This game is basically a one-suited version of 'Oh Hell'. You lose a point for each trick by which you miss your bid; game ends when someone gets down to zero.
Oh Hell bidding and play skills are very transferrable here, but the feel of the game is quite different -- more cutthroat. The hands move very quickly, but there are a lot of hands, since often only one person misses their bid, and often for -1 point. A nice feature of such scoring is that you can be way behind and still win as long as you start making your bid. (In Oh Hell, making up a loss is a lot harder, especially since the number of hands is fixed.)
For extra flavor, there is a special card that can be played high (22 - hence the 22 in '22 Whist') or low (0). And when you're down to 1 card each, there is a goofy rule that you bid seeing other people's card but not your own. But the 1 card hand is really pretty goofy in Oh, Hell, too, so what the hell.
Recommended.
P.S. This is not AT ALL the whist I grew up with, which was basically an ancestor of contract bridge.
Oh Hell bidding and play skills are very transferrable here, but the feel of the game is quite different -- more cutthroat. The hands move very quickly, but there are a lot of hands, since often only one person misses their bid, and often for -1 point. A nice feature of such scoring is that you can be way behind and still win as long as you start making your bid. (In Oh Hell, making up a loss is a lot harder, especially since the number of hands is fixed.)
For extra flavor, there is a special card that can be played high (22 - hence the 22 in '22 Whist') or low (0). And when you're down to 1 card each, there is a goofy rule that you bid seeing other people's card but not your own. But the 1 card hand is really pretty goofy in Oh, Hell, too, so what the hell.
Recommended.
P.S. This is not AT ALL the whist I grew up with, which was basically an ancestor of contract bridge.