Hungarian Tarokk

The goal: win Victory Points: deliver your contract, and above all the announcements, which grow to be worth more than the contract itself. Card Points are your tool: 48 of the 94 wins the hand.

Ask a Hungarian table and they will tell you, with a straight face, that this is a simple game: four contracts, one way to count, nothing exotic. And they are right, and they are lying. Hungarian Tarokk is a simple machine operated by a complicated community: the contracts are the smallest ladder in this book, but the announcements tower over them, and one card, the XXI, carries more fear than entire other games. Doctors, poets and chess players have ruined perfectly good friendships over it since the nineteenth century. The machine you can learn this afternoon. The community takes a lifetime, and the sidebar in this chapter will at least teach you to hear it talking.

The Cards

Hungarian Tarokk plays with the 42-card deck: set aside the 2, 3 and 4 of Hearts and Diamonds and the 7, 8 and 9 of Clubs and Spades, and keep all 22 Taroks, the Birds included. What remains is five cards per color suit (King, Queen, Cavalier, Jack, and the red 1s or the black 10s) plus the full Tarok suit.

Three cards rule this game and have their own title, the honours (the trio you know as the Trull): the Skus (Skíz), the XXI and the Pagat (Pagát). Remember the word; the bidding runs on it.

The Preparation

Four players sit around the table, play runs counter-clockwise, and the Forehand sits to the dealer’s right. The player opposite cuts. The dealer lays the first six cards face-down in the middle as the talon, straight off the top, then deals nine cards to each player (nine tricks per hand). The deal passes right. Five can play: the dealer deals for the other four, sits the hand out, and never scores.

The Bidding

The ladder has four rungs, named for how many talon cards the Declarer will take: Three (Három), Two (Kettő), One (Egy), Solo (Szóló): the fewer you take, the more the hand is worth. The Forehand speaks first and out loud (no silent opening in Hungary), and bidding runs counter-clockwise from them, up the ladder as Core Concepts taught.

The honour requirement. You may not bid, or stand, unless you hold at least one honour (Skus, XXI or Pagat): a stand is a bid too. This is the game’s foundation: every auction is secretly a conversation about where the three big cards sit. One exception, beloved and reckless: the trial Three (próbahárom): the auction runs counter-clockwise from the Forehand, so the dealer always speaks last; if the first three players all pass, the dealer alone may bid Three without an honour, which ends the auction on the spot, gambling that the talon will provide. And if the dealer passes too? Then Hungary does what it does best and doubles the stakes: the cards are thrown in, the SAME dealer deals again, and the next full round of deals scores double. A second all-pass inside a doubled round stacks it to four times. Nobody wants to be the fourth pass; that is the point. If the Declarer’s three drawn talon cards contain no honour, play stops and each opponent adds the game’s value of 1.

Standing. The family’s standing right (Core Concepts) plays here too: when your turn comes round, you may hold the bid of a player who comes after you in the seat order, and they must climb or pass. The order runs from the Forehand, who counts first, round to the dealer, who counts last. Hungary adds two conditions of its own. First, you may stand only if you have already bid in this auction: standing is never your entrance into the auction. Second, a bid can be stood on only once: nobody stands on a stand, so after one, the next player must climb or pass. Beyond that, stand as often as new bids appear; the later bidder must climb or let go each time. (The word players speak is tartom, “I hold.”)

Yes, even the Solo calls a partner: Hungarian Tarokk is never truly one against three. The loneliness is in the talon, not the teams.

These are the base contracts, all you need for a full evening. When your table wants more, the Expansions add to them.

The Talon, shared by everyone

The Declarer takes cards off the top of the talon and the rest is shared among the other three players as evenly as possible, extra cards going to the seats nearest the Declarer’s right:

Final bid	Declarer	next player	then	last
Three (Három)	3	1	1	1
Two (Kettő)	2	2	1	1
One (Egy)	1	2	2	1
Solo (Szóló)	0	2	2	2

Everyone looks at their new cards privately, then everyone discards back to nine, face-down in front of themselves. Because nobody knows the partnerships yet, each player keeps their own tricks in a separate face-down pile until the called card surfaces; only then are the trick piles pushed together into two sides. The discards travel differently, and the rule is famous for surprising newcomers: the Declarer’s discard counts for the Declarer’s side, but the other three discards all count for the defenders, even the discard made by the player who turns out to be the Declarer’s own partner.

The discard laws: seven cards are protected, the three honours and the four Kings, and they may never be discarded. If the Declarer discards Taroks, those are turned face-up for all to see; everyone else discards quietly.

Calling the Twenty, Hungarian style

Only now, with the exchange done, does the Declarer call the XX, and its silent holder becomes their partner, exactly as in Calling the Twenty: not a word, not a nod. Holding the XX yourself, you call the XIX; holding that too, the XVIII, and so on. (Call a card you secretly hold, and you are alone in disguise: legal, occasionally brilliant.) Two pieces of old fine print: a Declarer who discarded a Tarok may call ANY Tarok except an honour; and if the called Tarok turns out to be lying in someone’s discards, the Declarer plays alone, and the discarder must kontra the game, no choice about it.

Should you claim it?

Pick up your nine cards and look first for an honour: this section shows how a Hungarian player sizes up a hand before bidding.

The honour requirement already does half the counting: no honour, no bid.

Bid Three (Három) on most hands that pass the honour gate, and on almost anything holding the Skus. Five of your nine cards being Taroks is merely the average hand here; do not wait for a mountain.

Climb to Two, One or Solo mainly to outbid a rival: each rung up costs you a talon card, so the auction should push you up the ladder, not pride. (Traditional tables load higher and jumped bids with coded promises; that is the invitation system, and it waits on the Expansions page.)

The King insight: Hungarian suits run only five cards deep, and barely a third of the cards in play are suit cards at all, so expect a lone King to be trumped: lean on your Taroks and honours instead.

Bonuses, Announcements and the Kontra

Now the second auction begins, the one Hungarian Tarokk is famous for. Beginning with the Declarer and circling counter-clockwise, each player in turn may announce bonuses for their side, kontra things the other side has said, or pass; the round keeps circling until three players in a row have only passed.

Any announcement, and the contract itself, can be doubled by the other side (“kontra”), redoubled back (“rekontra”), and doubled once more (“subkontra”), each fought separately.

One elegant complication, because partnerships are still secret: the table must always be able to tell which side an announcement belongs to. The convention: an announcer is assumed to be on the same side as the last player who announced or kontra’d anything (or the Declarer’s side, at the start). If you are secretly AGAINST that player, you must attach a kontra to something of theirs in the same breath, showing your colors. A Kontra unmasks you; that is part of the game. (Yes, this is the moment Hungarian Tarokk becomes Hungarian Tarokk. The full etiquette lives at gotarok.com/66.)

Hear it once, and it clicks. The contract is settled and the announcements run. The Declarer opens: “Trull.” The next player says “Four Kings” and attaches no kontra, so the table files those Kings with the Declarer’s side, and every eyebrow asks the same question: is that the called partner speaking? The third player says “Kontra the Trull, and Pagat Ultimo.” That kontra flips the ledger: she has shown herself against the Declarer, and her Ultimo now scores for the other side. Every sentence raised the stakes, and every sentence showed a color.

Bonus	In short	Silent	Announced	Failed attempt
Trull (tulétroá)	capture all three honours; a table bonus, captured, not held	+1	+2	announced only: opponents +2
Four Kings (négykirály)	capture all four Kings	+1	+2	announced only: opponents +2
Pagat Ultimo	the Pagat wins the last trick	+5	+10	opponents +5 silent attempt / +10 announced
XXI-catch (XXI-fogás)	your Skus captures their XXI	+21	+42	announced and failed: opponents +42

And two feats that are not added on top but multiply the game itself:

Feat	In short	Effect on the game score	Announced
Double game	take 71 or more of the 94	game pays ×2 instead of ×1	×4
Valat (volát)	win all nine tricks; outranks double game	game pays ×3	×6

An announced multiplier that fails is scored by the opponents at the same multiplied rate. Read the XXI-catch line again, because it is the soul of the game: catching the enemy XXI with your Skus is worth more than winning ten ordinary contracts. The player who loses the XXI this way traditionally earns the mocking title of the Mayor (Polgármester), and wears it until someone else blunders. Protect your XXI the way Slovenians protect their Moon; here the stakes are even less forgiving. An announced Pagat Ultimo card is shown and saved for the end as everywhere.

Playing the Hand

The Forehand leads the first trick. Nine tricks, the usual laws: follow the led suit, Tarok when void. There is no Rising Rule anywhere (no negative contracts exist).

Scoring the Hand

The Declarer and the called partner push their piles together, the defenders theirs. Then the family’s simplest count, and the one game where there is no dividing at all: count your captured cards, then add the pips. Done. Step one, the base count: 1 per captured card. Step two, the pip count: honours and Kings carry 4 pips, Queens 3, Cavaliers 2, Jacks 1, everything else none. The deck holds 94 Card Points; the Declarer’s side wins at 48.

A worked example, at the table. The Declarer and the called partner push their piles together; the side gathers 30 cards: the three honours (Skus, XXI and Pagat), two Kings, one Queen, two Cavaliers, one Jack, and twenty-one plain cards that fill out the pile. Step one, the base count, the family’s easiest: 1 per card, so 30 cards make 30. Step two, the pip count: 4 apiece for the three honours and the two Kings, 3 for the Queen, 2 apiece for the two Cavaliers, 1 for the Jack, nothing from the twenty-one plain cards, so 28. Base count plus pip count: 30 + 28 = 58 of 94 Card Points, past the 48 needed, so the Declarer’s side has won.

Victory Points, Simplified style: every member of the winning side adds the contract’s value (1 to 4), multiplied by double game or Valat if made, and doubled again by whatever Kontras were live. Bonuses go to the side that earned them, silent or announced, kontra’d or not, win or lose, and every member of that side adds them, just like the contract. Failed attempts pay the other side.

The order never varies: the double game and Valat multipliers lift the contract alone, never the bonuses, and each Kontra doubles only the one item it names. Bid Two, make a silent double game, and announce the Pagat Ultimo, and you score 2 × 2 = 4 for the game beside a flat 10 for the Ultimo, 14 in all; a Kontra aimed at the game would lift that 4 to 8 and leave the 10 untouched.

The session runs in rounds of four deals (five with five players), and tradition has the ending exactly right: notice to finish is given, customarily by a player who is losing, and the session ends when the current round completes.

The contracts at a glance