Strawman (Strohmandeln) is the tarock family’s 2 player tarock duel; Dappen seats six to eight players with the same 54-card deck. Both move part of the game onto the table itself: Strawman with face-up Straw Man piles, Dappen with the twelve-card Dapp one player claims to fight the whole room. Between them, one deck covers every table size you own.
Every other comparison in this series weighs games that could plausibly share a table. Not this one. These two mark the family’s outer walls, and together they make a quiet argument no single game can make alone. If you are reading this, you probably live at one extreme or bounce between both. Here is what each wall is made of.
By the numbers
A trick, the unit every stat below uses: one round where each player plays a card face up and the best card takes them all (new to trick-taking? start here). Strawman: 2 players, all 54 cards in play, 15-card hands plus three four-card piles each, 27 two-card tricks per hand, 2 contracts, 3 bonuses, one difficulty dot, 36 of 70 Card Points to win (Card Points are what you capture in tricks), and a race to 11 Victory Points, the running match score that won hands feed. Dappen: 6 to 8 players, the same 54 cards, hands of only 7 tricks (six players) or 6 (seven), 2 contracts plus the Challenge (a defender’s direct dare), two difficulty dots, the under-40 target, session played to a fixed score. The spread is the whole story: one Strawman hand contains as many tricks as four Dappen hands, and where Strawman gives each player 27 cards to manage across hand and piles, a seven-player Dappen hand is 6 cards of pure commitment. Longest game in the family per hand against the shortest; fewest players against the most.
What the 2 player and 8 player games share
For the family’s two oddest table sizes, these games solve the same problem the same clever way: when the players are too few or too many for the classic four-seat auction, put more of the game on the table itself.
Strawman does it with its namesake piles: face-up card stacks sitting between the two players, their top cards playable as if held in hand, refilled by a flip whenever one is spent. The table becomes a third presence, an open market both players farm and fear.
Dappen does it with the Dapp: twelve cards counted face-down into the middle before anyone gets a hand. Whoever claims it rebuilds their hand from it and takes on the entire room alone, trying to hold everyone else under 40 Card Points. The table holds the treasure; the players argue over who must, or may, take it.
Neither game uses the family’s score-doubling Kontra, both keep the bidding refreshingly short, and both spent their histories in villages rather than cities: Strawman in alpine taverns and family kitchens, Dappen in the Black Forest, where its players wrote the rules down in 2024 to save them.
Where they could not differ more
Intimacy versus theater. Strawman is silence and calculation: one opponent, long hands, an open board where the better plan wins and both players know it. Dappen is noise and nerve: one Dapper against a wall of defenders playing as one team with one heartbeat, everyone invested, everyone loud.
Control versus tide. Strawman is the family’s lowest-chaos game; nearly every result is traceable to a choice. Dappen runs on managed chaos: the Dapper gambles on twelve unseen cards, the defense coordinates across six hands, and the reward tiers turn each band of Card Points into a cliffhanger.
Session shape. Strawman races to 11 Victory Points, a contained match with a rematch built in. Dappen scores hand by hand toward a session target while the deal rotates the spotlight; the evening ends when the table does.
Practicalities, then, because these two games live in the most different rooms of the family. Dappen’s crowded table is where card legibility stops being taste: our deck’s clean white backgrounds and calm faces exist because we counted lean-forwards in playtesting, and players simply lean in less when the table reads from their chair. Seven players deep, that is the game staying a game. Strawman’s virtue is the opposite one: a game for two travels everywhere, and this deck travels lighter and flatter than the traditional packs we have weighed it against, which makes hotel rooms, train tables and mountain huts part of its natural range. One deck, pocket duel to full party.
Which one is for you?
Choose Strawman if your evenings are built for two: a partner, a rival, a standing Tuesday. It is not the family’s consolation prize; it is one of its most strategic games, and pairs who start often stay.
Choose Dappen if your evenings are built for a crowd: game nights that outgrow four chairs, family gatherings, the cabin week. Nothing else in the book, and little else anywhere, gives seven people this much game from one deck.
If your table looks different: at four players, the family’s whole heartland opens up; start with Calling the Twenty, the entry game our deck arrives presorted to teach, and read our Calling the Twenty vs Calling the King comparison to plan the climb. At three, Slovenian Tarok is the family’s best answer. And if you love Dappen’s lone-hero drama in a smaller room, the solo contracts of Calling the King carry the same torch at four. The whole series is at all fifteen comparisons.
Quick answers
What is a Straw Man in Strohmandeln? A small face-up pile between the players whose top card you may play as if from your hand, refilled by a flip when spent.
Which tarock game has the longest hands? Strawman, at 27 tricks per hand, as many tricks as four Dappen hands.
Both games, and four more, are taught from zero in the Tarok Exploration Book, played with one deck.