Barbu - should the declarer pass after every hand?

Question

The wikipedia page for Barbu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbu_(card_game)#Preliminaries) states:

The declarer names each one of the contracts once. After this declarer has played all seven contracts, the roles of declarer and dealer pass to the left for the next seven hands, and so on, until all have done their seven contracts.

However, my game group has always passed the declaring of the contract to the next player after each hand, while still observing the "each player calls each contract only once" rule. We feel this choice keeps the game more interesting without materially altering the rules of the game. Wikipedia call this variant "Quick Rotation Barbu".

What is the usual practice? Do others see an advantage to each player calling 7 contracts in a row and passing the declaring only once?

Answer 1

In France, it's not considered a house-rule, but a variant. It's usually played that way with newcomers because it makes the game more active and seems more "fair" since people don't have to do their contracts in a row.

This way, this make it less of a challenge for the last player who, in the normal game, might be frightened and decide he can't do better than one of the previous score.

This variant is quite efficient to avoid this, that's mainly why we play this way since it also mitigates successive "bad" draws.

The "bad" thing with this is that it's quite hard to read what will come next, I usually don't raise a fuss about it but one of my mates prefer the original way of playingbecause it's more ordered.