Trick-taking, the card-game form where every player plays one card and the best one takes them all, is roughly as old as playing cards in Europe. Cards arrived on the continent in the late 1300s, and within a generation people were leading, following suit and fighting over tricks. But the invention that shaped five centuries of card games came a little later, in northern Italy around the 1430s: a deck with a built-in fifth suit that beat all the others. The trump suit. And the deck it debuted in is the direct ancestor of the Tarok games we publish.
Before trumps: the flat battlefield
The earliest European trick games worked like a fair fight: four suits, highest card of the led suit wins, nothing outranks anything outside its own suit. Skill lived in memory and timing, but a weak hand had few ways to fight back. German players experimented early (the game Karnöffel, recorded in the 1420s, let certain cards break the rules), yet the idea had not found its final shape.
The trionfi: trumps are born
The breakthrough came at the Italian courts. Card makers added a fifth suit of lavishly illustrated cards, the trionfi or “triumphs”, with a simple, radical rule: any triumph beats any card of the four ordinary suits. The word migrated into English as “trump”, and the mechanism migrated into practically every trick-taking game invented since. When Bridge or Skat names a trump suit for the deal, it is borrowing an Italian idea from the 1430s.
The original trump deck did not disappear into the museum. It kept being played, and as it wandered across the Alps it changed names with the borders: tarocchi in Italy, tarot in France, Tarock in Austria and Germany, tarok and tarokk further east. Along the way it collected the innovations that define the family today: bidding for contracts, calling a card to find a secret partner, and bonuses that even the losing side can score.
One detour deserves its own sentence: the fortune-telling associations of “tarot” were attached to the deck by French occultists in the late 1700s, three and a half centuries after people started playing games with it. The cards’ first job, and in the Alps their continuous job ever since, is strategy.
The family today: not a relic
The trump suit’s birthplace games are still alive, and not quietly. Austria added Königrufen, Calling the King, to its UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2024. Slovenia plays Slovenian Tarok as a national card game with clubs and championships. Hungary’s coffeehouse classic Hungarian Tarokk has run since the nineteenth century, and in the Black Forest, the players of Dappen wrote their village game down in 2024 to save it. This is a living tradition with tournaments, arguments and grandmothers who will correct your discards.
Five centuries of history do come with a tax, though: these games were handed down at the table, not learned from boxes, and the traditional decks assume you grew up with them. No point values printed anywhere, ornate faces that all look alike to a newcomer, ranking rules that live purely in memory. The games are not hard; the onboarding is. That is the pain point we built our deck against: the Card Point values sit on the cards as countable pips, small arrows show which way each suit ranks, the trumps carry an animal order you can read at a glance, and the deck ships presorted for a guided first game. The history stays five hundred years deep; learning it now takes one evening.
Why we think this branch is the one to learn
Plenty of wonderful trick-taking games came later, and we will not pretend otherwise. But the Tarok family kept three things the mainstream lines gave up. Permanent trumps: the 22 Taroks are always the trump suit, so the deepest part of the game, trump management, is always on. Contracts for every hand: you bid for what the hand will be, and even a dreadful hand has a contract that fits it, including contracts won by losing. And bonuses for everyone: side goals that any player can score, so no hand is ever mere damage control. Five centuries of table-testing distilled into six living games, playable by 2 to 8 players from a single 54-card deck; Why Tarok lays out the full argument, and our comparison series helps you pick your entry.
If the mechanics above went by too fast, What is a trick-taking game? starts from zero. And if you like your history counted rather than told, Six Tarok Games by the Numbers measures what five centuries of evolution did to the actual deal.
Quick answers
Where does the word “trump” come from? From the Italian trionfi, the “triumph” cards of the 15th-century Italian decks that were the first suit to beat all others.
Are tarot cards for games or fortune-telling? Games came first by about 350 years; the divination use was added in late 18th-century France, while the Alpine countries kept playing.
The family’s six living games are taught from zero in the Tarok Exploration Book, played with one deck.