This reminds me of a family card game we played when I was younger called Rook. It was very similar to bridge in that you played with a partner, bid for a contract/trump, and table talk was not allowed. We did allow non-verbal forms of communication and that became a large part of a winning strategy. We mixed up partners and the escalation became so great that we had a different form of communication for each of the different partners. Then a scheme would be figured out and we would have to rotate our codes to something else. It was like a family game of thermonuclear war by the time us kids moved out. Just like I think they should have a legal doping class in cycling where it is okay to take performance enhancing drugs, we should just make an open class of bridge where non-verbal communication is allowed and the schemes are not shared with the opposing pair. I'll bet we would observe some interesting behavior emerge between partners.

And I have to hand it to the New Yorker for this one. Longform journalism is hit or miss for me, but I really enjoyed reading about this game that I've never played before. I guess the author did a good enough job explaining the game that I figured out that it was similar to Spades, Hearts, Euchre, and Rook in some ways that I stuck with it until the end.