I LEARNED to play Bela in the summer of 2024. I was taking Hungarian language classes in a small city close to the Croatian border, and I had made a few friends: two Croatian grad students, a Turkmen professional living in Budapest, an environmental consultant from D.C. The days were hot, and we killed time after class in bars and cafés, where the hope of a thin breeze was preferable to the stagnant air of our dorm rooms.  We sat and talked and played games: twenty questions, darts, rummy, piatnik. My favorite game we played was Bela.

Bela, pronounced bay-luh and also called Belot, is a four player, trick-taking, jack-nine card game popular in Croatia. It is played with a 32-card piquet deck. Bela is fast-paced, and requires an understanding of card rank, some strategy, and not a small amount luck. Iterations of the game are played throughout Europe: the German klabberjass, the French belote. The rules in this guide reflect the version commonly played in former Yugoslav states.

This is a zine I made in order to teach my friends back home how to play Bela. I designed a set of piatnik cards to accompany the game; the result is a 20-page zine between instruction manual, comic strip, and 2000s teen magazine.