A card game for 4 players (or more if playing DuplicateBridge)

The game consists of 2 phases of play.

1) The auction, which establishes who plays and who defends and what the contract to make is

this is particularly interesting to me as a DSP engineer as it involves incomplete communication over a lossy channel 

2) The play, in which the declarer trys to make the contract while the defenders try to stop the contract (and dummy does nothing)

here we get to use various patterns to try to make tricks with cards that would normally not win, which pattern to apply depends partly on the cards you can see, partly on the probabilities of the unseen cards and partly on any other information revealed about the unseen cards during phase 1)