This is the tougher nut to crack. The sections below describe the consecutive phases for one game. Remember that it's advisable to have some experience playing whist v0.5 as explained in the Trick game page. The current page is exclusively dedicated to colour whist standard contract play (v0.6). This is the core of the game and the steps from there to full v1 are much easier.
The cycle of life
Cut, deal, bid, play, repeat
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The cut: Put the cards face down on the table. A player cuts the card deck by splitting the deck in two parts. The lower half goes back on top of the upper one, and the deck is handed to the dealer, to the left of the cutter.
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The dealer then hands out the cards (clockwise), starting with the player to his left, in packs of four cards, during 3 rounds. In the third round, 5 cards are to be dealt instead of four, making for a total of 4+4+5=13 cards for each player.
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The first bidder: is the player next to the dealer (clockwise). He or she will also be the one to start the first trick of the playing phase.
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Starting the next game: Once a game is bid, played and scored, the cards are put together without shuffling and we rotate 1 player clockwise to cut again.
Bidding a regular game
Team up!
Contrary to standard whist you got to know in 0.5, the trump colour is not predefined anymore now. The players will rather try to get their best suit to become trump through bidding. It goes as follows:
The first bidder can choose to either pass when the cards are just bad or otherwise ask a suit (just by calling its name). Most oftenly the length of the suit drives this choice.​ F.e. say you have a hand with 2 spades, 4 clubs, 6 diamonds and 1 heart, then you can bid "(ask) diamonds".
The next player (always clockwise, won't repeat this in the future) has one more option besides passing or asking another suit. The 3rd option is to join. In the example case this would be "join diamonds". After joining, a team is made.
Continuing on this example, the third player will now again only have two options: pass or ask another suit than diamonds (there's no suit to join anymore). To finalise the example bid, suppose player 3 asks hearts and player 4 joins hearts, so that we end up with two teams, one for diamonds and one for hearts.
Bidding a regular game
... or don't team up.
We ignored the option to pass in the example above. By passing a player refrains from any further bidding for the game at hand. Taking back the example where player one and two team up in diamonds, but now let's say player 3 has a bad hand and passes instead. This changes the options for player 4 since no team can be made anymore. In such case, player 4 will be allowed to either pass or otherwise bid alone in his preferred suit to form a single-player team, if he chooses to.
The minimum commitment for a contract by 2 players (ask+join) is 8 tricks, and for a single-player contract 5 tricks. This is exactly the same as in standard whist, but since multiple bids for contracts can exist for a game (in different trump suits), an outbidding phase will allot the final bid: this will be described further on, but before going there, we'll first describe some more bidding situations that can occur.
One last option we didn't mention yet is a bid that's exclusively limited to the first bid that is made: only the first player has this option in his first bid. Instead of pass or ask suit, he's also allowed to "wait". This just means "I may join when it's my next bid". This bid strictly limits the choices of the second bid of that player to pass or "join someone else who asked".
Bidding a regular game
In the above examples the teams were formed immediately after each player made one bid. This often isn't the case and then players can keep bidding clockwise for max 3 rounds, provided they (a) did not team up yet and (b) did not pass yet. After the third bid and without anyone joining, you will be forced to pass or form your own single-player team.
An extreme example of 3 bid rounds where player 1 starts of with spades:
Round 1: Spades, clubs, hearts, join spades.
Round 2: /, diamonds, hearts, / (using the / to indicate that player 1 and 4 already teamed up and hence stay silent)
Round 3: /, clubs, hearts, /
After the 3 rounds players two and three fail to team up, so now they must both choose to pass or play as a 1-player team. Supposing they both choose to form their own team, we end up with a total of 3 teams and 3 contracts. Outbidding between the 3 teams will also allot the final contract.
merry go round aka when it takes time to find a partner
Outbidding the other team
The basics page explained this is a trick game and that the suits have an order of prevalence (H>D>C>S). A team has a minimum of 8 tricks to make. This will now all come together in the final part of the bidding where you struggle to win the contract that will then be played, with the trump suit of the winning team (more on this later). Let's take back the first example where one team bid diamonds and the other hearts. By forming up the teams you commit to making a minimum of 8 tricks provided your suit gets to be the trump colour.
It's up to the players that joined to now settle who wins the contract, player 2 for team diamonds and player 4 for the hearts team. Since the diamonds suit is lower than hearts (H>D>C>S), 8 tricks in diamonds is considered a lower bid than 8 tricks in hearts. If player 2 wants to outbid the hearts team, he has the choice to raise the level to 9 diamonds, or otherwise pass and give the contract win to the hearts team.
In case player two chooses to raise the bid to 9 diamonds, player 4 can then decide to also raise the hearts bid to 9 tricks. This continues until one of them gives up (passes) and allows the other team to play the contract at the latest level of tricks that they bid.
Note: For 1-player teams the bidding goes alike, but 3 trick levels below the bid of a 2-player team: so f.e. a bid of 9 tricks in diamonds for a 2-player team can be outbid by a 1-player team in clubs by bidding 7 clubs. If the 1-player team would have chosen hearts iso clubs, he could have outbid with 6 hearts (take some time to let this sink in).
who wins the contract?
Pass the word, and then the rest you know already
When a contract is decided, say 9 diamonds, then the play starts exactly as you remember from the basic whist (v0.5 version) that was described in the previous page. The same goes for the scoring, with the logical adaptation that the mimimum number of tricks to succeeed the contract is not necessarily 8 (or 5) anymore. So for a 9 diamonds contract, the basic 2 points will only get allotted if the team makes 9 tricks. In standard whist this would have been 3 points (2+1 overtrick) since there's no outbidding there.
One more exception rule and then you can get some rest: passe-parôle. This is the "passing of the word" to your team mate. As we've seen, when outbidding, it is the joiner who speaks (and never the asker). The exception to this is that, if the required bid level is (strictly!) above 10 tricks, then the joiner can still decide pass or increase of bid level, but additionally (when in doubt typically) he can pass the word to the asker, who can then decide to increase the bid or pass.
Congratulations, you know the most difficult part. Add-ons will be discussed in the next page.
round-up