Calling the King (Königrufen) and Slovenian Tarok are sibling tarock games: both call a King to find a secret partner and play 54 cards to 70 Card Points, the points you capture in tricks. The King, built for exactly four players, offers the wider contract ladder and additive, forgiving scoring; Slovenian Tarok runs 9 exactly priced contracts and a ledger where only the Declarer’s side, the bid winner’s, writes, up or down. Slovenian Tarok is also the family’s best three-player game.
Neither is the child of the other. Both rebuild the Declarer’s hand from a talon, a face-down reserve of cards, under strict discard rules, and in both, 36 of those 70 points carries most contracts. Put the rulebooks side by side and whole paragraphs rhyme. Then look at the score sheet, and you will see two different philosophies of what a card game is for.
By the numbers
The overlap is real: both play 54 cards and deal 12-trick hands beside a six-card talon, a trick being one round where each player plays a card face up and the best card takes them all (new to trick-taking? start here). Both count to 70 Card Points with 36 the usual bar, and both wear all three difficulty dots. The split is just as countable. The King teaches 7 contracts in its basic game and its House Rules add another shelf (face-up “ouvert” games, tougher trick-promises, and score-doubling challenges); Slovenia runs a 9-contract priced staircase in the basic game itself, every rung with an exact value. The King’s bonuses reward what you capture; Slovenia’s ledger subtracts what you fail. Same deck physics too: with eight-card color suits, a color lead survives all followers, the cards played after it, in about 58 percent of tricks in both games. The difference is never the tricks. It is what the tricks cost.
Calling the King: the Austrian breadth
Calling the King (Königrufen) is the family’s cathedral. Its contract ladder is wide: partnered games, solos, color contracts that strip the Taroks, the permanent trump suit, of their power to beat every color card, and the beloved negative contracts, Picolo (win exactly one trick) and Bettler (win none at all). Around the contracts circles a whole flock of bonuses: capturing the last trick with the lowest trump, bringing home the called King in the final trick, and more, each scoreable silently or announced for double. Austria entered the game into its national UNESCO inventory of intangible cultural heritage in 2024, and it earned that breadth over more than two centuries of play, with the rules first written down in 1827.
The King’s scoring is additive and generous. Deliver your contract, stack your bonuses, write it down. Losses sting, but the game’s pleasure sits in its variety: every deal offers several reasonable futures.
Slovenian Tarok: the sharper scoring
Slovenian Tarok looked at all that baroque and reached for a knife. Fewer contract curiosities, exact prices on a strict staircase, and a scoring ledger with a signature move: only the Declarer’s side writes. Win and your column climbs; fail and it carves downward, in ink. Defenders never write at all; their reward is your falling number.
Then Slovenia adds its own inventions. Klop, the contract where everyone plays alone and every Card Point captured is pure damage. The Moon rule, where the second-highest trump becomes a personal liability that can cost its owner more than the hand itself. And the concept of distance: contracts are won by how far past the threshold you land, so a scraped victory and a crushing one are not the same victory.
It is the national card game of Slovenia, with clubs, championships and a hundred years of competitive polish. That polish is the point: this is the sharpest scoring in the family.
Trumps and counting: the difference in your hands
Both games ask you to track a tall trump ladder under pressure, and here our deck quietly helps: the Tarok suit carries an alpine animal ranking where the stronger the animal, the stronger the card. You can rank two trumps mid-trick at a glance, without decoding Roman numerals on busy traditional faces. And when the hand ends and the counting starts, the Card Points are printed on the cards themselves as pips: in a Slovenian evening, where a single point of distance can swing your column, counting what you see beats trusting what you memorized. And for players already rooted in one of these traditions with a cherished deck at home: ours weighs less and packs smaller than the decks we have compared it against, which makes the travel copy the natural place for it to start.
Which one is for you?
Choose Calling the King if variety is your happiness: a wide ladder, negative contracts, a bonus flock, and a scoring style that celebrates what you achieved rather than carving what you failed. It is the deeper museum, and you can wander it for years.
Choose Slovenian Tarok if competition is your happiness: exact prices, real downside, a ledger with memory. It is also the family’s best three-player game, so a trio decides this comparison instantly.
If you cannot choose, your group’s temperament will: the table that laughs off a bad hand belongs in Vienna, the table that recounts the pile twice belongs in Ljubljana.
If your table looks different: for the doubling-duel culture that Slovenian kontras hint at, Hungarian Tarokk goes all the way; read our Slovenian Tarok vs Hungarian Tarokk comparison. New players should start neither here nor there, but with Calling the Twenty, the family’s entry game, and climb from it. All the pairings are gathered at all fifteen comparisons.
Quick answers
Are Königrufen and Slovenian Tarok the same game? No; they share the 54-card deck and the King call but differ in contracts and above all in scoring, additive in Austria and signed Declarer-only in Slovenia.
Which is better for three players? Slovenian Tarok; Calling the King needs exactly four.
Both games, and four more, are taught from zero in the Tarok Exploration Book, played with one deck.