Calling the King (Königrufen) is a four-player tarock built on hidden information: a secret called partner, a face-down talon of reserve cards, bonuses that may stay silent. Strawman (Strohmandeln) is the family’s 2 player tarock, with half the cards face up in Straw Man piles between the players. The King rewards social inference; Strawman rewards pure calculation; both reward thinking hard.
Strip them to their cores and you find the same pleasure, thinking hard about cards, served in opposite ways. One is a detective story; the other is a chess adjacent staring contest with flips.
By the numbers
First the unit both stat lines lean on: a trick is one round where each player plays a card face up and the best card takes them all (new to trick-taking? start here). The King: 4 players, 54 cards, 12 four-card tricks per hand, 7 basic contracts, a called partner, a six-card talon, all three difficulty dots, 36 of 70 Card Points to win (Card Points are what you capture in tricks). Strawman: 2 players, the same 54 cards all in play, 15-card hands plus three four-card piles each, 27 two-card tricks per hand, 2 contracts, one difficulty dot, the same 36 of 70 bar, and a race to 11 Victory Points, the running match score that won hands feed. Read that middle number again: a Strawman hand is more than twice as long as a King hand, trick for trick, and roughly half those tricks involve a card that was lying face up for both players to plan around.
The King’s game: deduce everything
In Calling the King, the auction winner calls a King, and its holder becomes their secret ally. For several tricks, nobody is sure who stands with whom; every played card is testimony. Add the wide contract ladder, from partnered games through solos down to the negative contracts where you promise to win one trick or none, plus a flock of bonuses that can arrive silently or announced, and you get a game where the deepest skill is inference: who has what, who wants what, who is lying.
Strawman’s game: see everything, plan everything
Strawman removes the crowd and most of the secrecy. Two players, big hands, and between you the Straw Men: small piles whose face-up top cards you may play as if from your hand. Spend a table card and the pile flips a new face. Your hand is a garden you cultivate; the flips are weather. There are only two ways a hand begins, a Declarer’s game or the everyone-loses scramble when both players pass, so the game’s depth is not in choosing contracts. It is in the fifteen-plus tricks of pure play, where every decision is yours and visible, and a lost hand has nobody else’s fingerprints on it.
The bonuses survive the trip to two players, and they bring a twist: score them silently or announce them for double. Announcing tells your opponent exactly what to defend. The bluffing space between those options is where Strawman’s psychology lives.
Players, thinking style, tempo: what decides between them
Chairs. The obvious one: the King needs four, Strawman needs two. But do not file Strawman as the fallback. It is one of the most strategic games in the family, full stop, and some pairs play nothing else.
What kind of thinking you enjoy. The King rewards social inference; you play the people as much as the cards. Strawman rewards calculation; the information is there, and the better planner wins. A poker mind leans Vienna; a chess mind leans the tavern table.
Tempo. King hands are theatrical: auction, talon, announcements, play, reckoning. Strawman hands are long and absorbed; the traditional race to 11 Victory Points gives the duel a visible finish line.
Both games make you manage the trump ladder constantly (the Taroks: the permanent trump suit, 22 cards that beat every color card), and our deck’s alpine animal ranking, stronger animal, stronger trump, lets you compare two Taroks at sight instead of parsing Roman numerals mid-decision. Strawman adds its own small trap for newcomers: with so many cards lying face up, you are always reading ranks across the table, and the red suits famously rank their number cards in reverse. The direction arrows printed on the number pips settle it without a rules lookup, every single time.
Which one is for you?
Choose Calling the King if you have four players and love games where the truth emerges slowly. It is the family’s grand stage, UNESCO-listed and bottomless.
Choose Strawman if you have two players and love games where the truth is on the table and the burden is on you. It is the family’s purest test of play.
If your table looks different: two players who find Strawman’s open information too naked can await their next full table; there is no hidden-partner game for two, and we would rather say so than pretend. Three players go to Slovenian Tarok. And if the King’s negative contracts, winning by losing, become your favorite part, Slovenian Tarok’s beggar contracts run even further down that road; see our Calling the King vs Slovenian Tarok comparison. Every other pairing lives at all fifteen comparisons.
Quick answers
Can you play Königrufen with 2 players? No, it needs exactly four; Strawman (Strohmandeln) is the family’s two-player game with the same 54-card deck.
How long is a Strawman hand? 27 two-card tricks, more than twice a Königrufen hand, played in matches raced to 11 Victory Points.
Both games, and four more, are taught from zero in the Tarok Exploration Book, played with one deck.