What is "preferans"

n. A card game, related to bridge, Boston, and whist.

Preferans is an Eastern European 10-card plain-trick game with bidding, played by three or four players with a 32-card Piquet deck. It is a sophisticated variant of the Austrian game Préférence, which in turn descends from Spanish Ombre and French Boston.

Popular in Russia since approximately the 1830s, Preferans quickly became the country's national card game. Although superseded in this role by Durak, it is still one of the most popular games in Russia. Similar games are played in Eastern Europe from Lithuania to Greece, where an earlier form of Russian Preferans is known as Prefa . Compared to Austrian Préférence, Russian Preferans and Greek Prefa are distinguished by the greater number of possible contracts, which allows for almost any combination of trumps and numbers of tricks. Another distinguishing feature is the relatively independent roles played by the opponents of the soloist.