Slovenian Tarok (slovenski tarok) and Hungarian Tarokk are the tarock family’s two national games, and both carry its top difficulty rating. Slovenia plays 54 cards with 9 exactly priced contracts and a ledger where only the Declarer’s side, the bid winner’s, writes; Hungary plays 42 cards with just 4 contracts and moves the stakes into announcements and Kontra doubling. Pick Slovenia for quiet arithmetic pressure and Hungary for loud social pressure; neither is the easy option, and neither is the wrong one.
Both countries run organized play, and both games are woven into their homes the way chess is woven into cafés. Both are sharp, competitive, and unapologetic about it. Choosing between them is not choosing between easy and hard. It is choosing which kind of pressure you enjoy.
By the numbers
First, the unit everything below is counted in: 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). Slovenia: 3 to 4 players (a fifth rotates in as sitting dealer), 54 cards, 12 tricks per hand, a 9-contract priced staircase, 5 bonus families (groups of extra scoring feats), 36 of 70 Card Points for most contracts (Card Points are what you capture in tricks), hands feeding a session score to 200. Hungary: exactly 4 players, 42 cards, 9 tricks per hand, 4 contracts, 6 announcement types with a three-deep ladder of Kontra doublings, 48 of 94 to win, counted by plain addition. Both wear all three difficulty dots. The decks pull apart too: Hungary leans hardest on the Taroks, the permanent trump suit whose cards beat every color card, and its five-card color suits mean a color lead survives all three opponents in barely one trick of six, while Slovenia’s eight-card suits keep colors alive in more than half of all tricks. Hungary’s hands are short and explosive; Slovenia’s are long and cumulative, like its ledger.
Where the pressure comes from
Slovenia presses with the ledger. Slovenian Tarok scores on a signed plus-and-minus tally where only the Declarer’s side writes: victories climb your column, failures carve it downward, and the defenders’ reward is watching you fall. Contracts sit on a staircase of exact prices, from modest games of exchanging with the talon (the face-down reserve dealt aside) up through the beggar (win no tricks at all) and the summits played without touching the talon, and they are won by distance: how far past the threshold you land matters, not just whether you crossed it. Above it all hangs the Moon, the second-highest trump, which turns into a personal disaster for whoever loses it carelessly. The pressure is arithmetic, personal, and permanent. Your column is your reputation.
Hungary presses with the table. Hungarian Tarokk keeps its contract ladder tiny, four rungs, all calling the Tarok XX (the trump numbered 20) as partner, and pours everything into announcements: bold public promises, made mid-hand, that dwarf the contracts beneath them. Delivering the last trick with the Pagát, the lowest trump, capturing the enemy’s XXI, their second-highest, sweeping every trick. Each can be doubled with Kontra and doubled back, and when all four players pass, the cards are thrown in and the whole next round of deals counts double, so the pot is always simmering. The pressure is social: every promise is a small speech, and the table answers.
Seats, talon, scoring: the structural differences
Seats. Hungarian Tarokk wants exactly four. Slovenian Tarok is happy with four, is the family’s best game for three, and a fifth player can rotate in as the sitting dealer. Flexible groups lean Slovenian for that alone.
The talon. Slovenia gives it to the Declarer in priced portions: taking fewer cards raises the contract’s value. Hungary shares it around the whole table, so everyone shapes their hand and nobody fully blames the deal.
The count. Slovenia plays to 70 Card Points with 36 the usual threshold. Hungary counts to 94 with 48 to win, the family’s biggest total.
Negative play. Slovenia keeps rich everyone-for-themselves and win-nothing contracts, klop and the beggar. Hungary has no interest; its one concession to disaster is doubling the next deal.
Both games end every hand in serious counting, and this is where our deck’s plainest promise pays: the Card Points are printed on the cards as pips, so a Slovenian distance or a Hungarian 48 is counted off the table, not recalled from a memorized chart. When one point moves a signed column or settles a Kontra’d announcement, you want the count arguable by pointing, not by memory. One more note for players already rooted in one of these traditions, with a cherished national deck at home: fair enough, and we are not asking you to switch. But ours weighs noticeably less and packs flatter than the decks we compared it against, and “the deck that lives in the travel bag,” as one longtime player put it to us, is exactly the job it was built to win.
Which one is for you?
Choose Slovenian Tarok if you like your competition quiet and exact: prices, distances, a ledger with memory, and the discipline of protecting a column you built over a whole evening.
Choose Hungarian Tarokk if you like your competition loud and psychological: promises, doubles, table talk with consequences, and the occasional magnificent bluff collapsing in public.
A rough sorting hat: accountants and mountaineers, Ljubljana. Litigators and poker players, Budapest.
If your table looks different: newcomers should not start at either summit; Calling the Twenty is the family’s entry game and the one our presorted deck teaches first. Four players wanting breadth instead of edge should read our Calling the King vs Hungarian Tarokk comparison; the King offers a middle path with more contracts and softer scoring than either game here. The whole series is at all fifteen comparisons.
Quick answers
How many players do Slovenian Tarok and Hungarian Tarokk need? Hungarian Tarokk needs exactly four, while Slovenian Tarok plays with three or four and seats a fifth as sitting dealer.
What is the Moon in Slovenian Tarok? The second-highest trump, which costs its owner a heavy personal penalty if it is captured.
Both games, and four more, are taught from zero in the Tarok Exploration Book, played with one deck.