A trick-taking game is a card game played in small rounds called tricks: each player plays one card face up to the middle of the table, the best card wins, and the winner collects all the played cards into their pile. That is the entire engine. Whist, Bridge, Skat, Hearts and the whole Tarok family run on it, and if you have never played any of them, this page gives you everything the word “trick” is hiding.
One trick, step by step
Say four people are playing. The first player lays a card face up: this is called the lead. Going around the table, each other player lays one card too. When all four cards are down, somebody’s card is the best one, that player “wins the trick”, scoops the four cards into a face-down pile in front of them, and leads the next trick. A hand of cards is just this, repeated until the hands are empty: deal 12 cards each and you get 12 tricks, then the counting starts.
So far it sounds like luck. The rules that make it a game of skill are about which cards you are ALLOWED to play, and which card counts as best.
Following suit
Cards come in suits, and the first rule of nearly every trick-taking game is: you must follow suit if you can. If Hearts are led and you hold a Heart, you must play a Heart. The highest card of the led suit wins the trick. This single rule creates the game’s core tension: your beautiful high card in another suit is worthless in this trick, and everyone at the table is slowly working out who still holds what.
When you cannot follow suit (you are “void”), things get interesting, which brings us to trumps.
Trumps: the suit that beats all suits
Most trick-taking games crown one suit as the trump suit. A trump card beats every card of every ordinary suit, no matter how high. If you are void in the suit that was led, playing a trump usually steals the trick from under the highest lead. Managing your trumps, when to spend them, when to hold them, when to force other people to waste theirs, is where trick-taking play gets deep.
In many games the trump suit changes from deal to deal. The Tarok family took a different road five centuries ago: it added a fifth suit of permanent trumps to the deck itself, 22 cards called Taroks that always outrank the four ordinary suits. Historically that was the invention that gave every later game its trumps; you can read that story in our history of trick-taking games.
Scoring: not every trick is equal
The simplest games count tricks won. Most of the great ones count what is IN the tricks: each card carries a point value, and you total the values in your captured pile. In the Tarok family these are called Card Points, and the pile you collect during a hand feeds a running session score, the Victory Points, that decides the evening. Traditionally that meant memorizing a values chart before your first hand; on our deck the values are printed on the cards as countable pips, so the counting is counting, nothing more. Winning many worthless tricks can lose to winning three fat ones, which is why good players think about which tricks are worth fighting for.
One more layer makes the modern games sing: the contract. Before playing, players bid for the right to declare what this hand will be, from “my side captures the most points” to, in some games, “I will lose every single trick on purpose”. Suddenly a terrible hand is not a punishment; it is a different weapon. That inversion is the heart of the family we publish, and Why Tarok makes the full case for it.
Where to start playing
You do not learn trick-taking from an article; you learn it in three tricks at a real table, and the third one already feels natural. Our deck ships presorted for a guided first game of Calling the Twenty (Zwanzigerrufen), the family’s easiest four-player game, so the box opens straight into playing. From there, fifteen comparisons help you find which of the six games in the Tarok Exploration Book fits your table, from a 2 player duel to a card game for 6 to 8 players.
Quick answers
What does “trick” mean in card games? One round of play where each player plays one card face up and the best card wins them all; it has nothing to do with deception.
What is the difference between a trump and a suit? A trump belongs to a special suit that beats all ordinary suits; in the Tarok family the 22 Taroks are permanent trumps, built into the deck.
All six games of the family are taught from zero in the Tarok Exploration Book, played with one deck.