The basics
A bit of story telling to give you an idea of the game without going into any technical details. An appetiser if you want.
What you need
Gather a group of 4 or more people. Enjoy each other's stories, have dinner, make a pitstop, shove the dishes on the sink and put some drinks on the table. Now get a standard deck of 52 playing cards and let the fun begin.
For keeping scores get a sheet of paper and a pen or have some technologist pull out one of his or her magic devices for that purpose.
What it's all about
Colour whist is a 4 player trick game where you typically partner up with one of the 3 other player at the table. These partnerships can (and will) vary as decided in the bidding phase of each game. In a nutshell, each player gets to announce what sort of trick game he's interested in, until a partnership is found. The ultimate bid sets the contract that will then be played.
The playing is the eating of the pudding if you want. It validates if the players that won the bid can actually accomplish their claim.
Knowing the cards
Each players gets 13 cards at the start of the game, and a game consists of 13 tricks made up of 4 cards (one for each player).
There's an order of value in these cards: Within one suit, the ace is the highest card, followed by king, queen, jack, 10 down till 2. So far so good. This game adds the concept that there's also an order of value in the suits: hearts at the top, then diamonds, clubs and spades. More on this in a later page.
So it's basically like any trick card game?
Yes. The playing phase goes one trick at a time. The player that starts the trick determines the suit in which that trick has to be played, and the one who wins the trick will have the privilege of starting the next trick. This continues until all 13 tricks are played and then the game gets scored.
Anyway, so far this information could indeed still be about Bridge or Spades... Let's get down to what makes Colour Whist different.
Colour whist
The allure of Colour whist lies in its variable suit biddings. In many occasions each player will be able to partake in the bidding process and strategise his or her way into an optimal score. The most common bid will involve trying to get as many tricks as possible together with your partner, provided you get to choose the trump suit of the contract. For now it suffices to know that the trump suit will dominate the other suits in value.
At the same time Colour Whist also allows escape routes for players with a hand that's not suited (couldn't resist) for a trump game. These escape bids and contracts are very different and allow players to even go for the inverse premise: playing a contract where the aim is to win zero tricks.
A last word on the name of the game
Colour whist has its roots in Belgium, where the notion card "colour" is used interchangeably with card "suit".
A bit absurd obviously provided there's two red and two black suits but we're in the country of René Magritte here, so we're just trying to be consistent.