Introduction

This COVID-19 pandemic has left me with lots of free time spent in front of a computer at home. I’d been spending time with my friends playing various videogames online (the Jackbox Party Pack games work reasonably well over Discord or Zoom), and my fiancée suggested that we try to play tractor online… but I couldn’t find one that was easily available over the internet!

What’s tractor, anyways?

Tractor is a trick-taking card game popular in China, played with four or more players and with multiple decks. It’s commonly known as 升级 (“level-up”), 打百分 (“fighting for 100 points”), 四十分 (“forty points”), 八十分 (“eighty points”), or 拖拉機 (“tractor”). You can even find it on Wikipedia! The rules of the game are pretty complicated, and they vary widely: As far as I know, there isn’t a canonical source of rules for the game, at least in English.