Scratch

I read something about "Blocks", but got confused.

I'm used to older programming languages that have functions or procedures that look something like this:

function playCard(westHand, tableHand,nbrCard)
  **this function is called each time West plays a card
possibly returns a value


What I'm doing now is repeating the same blocks of code over and over and just changing a parameter or two each time through. For example, I might change whose turn it is to play a card(west, north, east or south).

Is there something I'm missing that will allow you to code more efficiently?