Playing cards

Another session! We started with Fairy Tale, which is the current favourite filler. It's indeed an excellent game, right now it's the hottest thing - I'm always up for a game. We even got a team game going, even though two of the guys thought they were paired with their neighbour, not the player opposite them. That made some strange results, but since both teams had traitors, everything worked out well.

Then, the main course: Slovenian Tarok (rules from ever faithful Card Games). We started with three players, played few rounds and got us a fourth player. It was very much a learning game, so it wasn't a big deal.

It's good. Like the Tarots in general, it's a trick-taking game (I guess you could see Tarot as a single game with plenty of variants). This one's played on a short deck, so there are 32 regular cards and 22 trumps, making the trumps rather important. One player becomes a declarer through bidding and chooses a contract. Then he tries to win more than half of the card points - with four players, he gets to name a partner by calling a king. With three, the declarer is always alone.

There are all sorts of tricky things about the game, but if you're an experienced trick-taker, it's not that hard. The bidding isn't that complicated, though evaluating hands is hard - but that's the whole point of playing new games, getting fresh challenges. I enjoyed the game very much, and I'm really looking forward to playing it again. I think my opponents enjoyed it as well. If you have access to tarot cards you can play games with, here's one to try.