Slovenian Tarok

The goal: deliver the contract you win at auction, alone or with a called King, and guard the bonuses, above all the Moon. Slovenia lets only the Declarer’s side score: win and you add the hand’s value, fall and you subtract the very same number. Most contracts ask for 36 of the 70 Card Points, and what carries them is solid Tarok length and careful counting.

From a hut in the Julian Alps to the buzzing streets of Ljubljana, the cards come out after dinner, and nobody needs to explain the rules, because somebody’s grandmother already did. Slovenian Tarok is the country’s house game: nineteen clubs, national rankings, and ten thousand living rooms that take it exactly seriously enough. It is Königrufen’s sibling, not its child, and the family resemblance ends at the score sheet: fewer contract curiosities, sharper knives. Here the bidding ladder is a staircase of exact prices, every hand is measured in distances, and one careless Moon can cost you more than the hand itself. They stripped away the baroque and kept the competition. Then they played it for a hundred years, just to be sure.

The Cards

Slovenian Tarok plays with the full deck: all 54 cards, holding 70 Card Points. Everything from the Meet the Deck chapter applies unchanged: red suits crown the 1, black suits the 10, and the Trull (here trula) rules the Tarok suit.

The Preparation

Four players sit around the table, and play runs counter-clockwise. The player opposite the dealer cuts. The dealer lays the first six cards face-down in the middle: the talon, straight off the top, untouched. Then packets of six to each player, starting right of the dealer, until everyone holds 12 cards.

The player to the dealer’s right is the Forehand. The deal passes right after every hand.

The Bidding

The player to the Forehand’s right speaks first, and the auction circles counter-clockwise: on your turn, bid a contract from the ladder or pass, and a pass is final. Once everyone has spoken, the Forehand joins the auction like everyone else, and counts first in the seat order. The lowest bid available in an open auction is Two (dvojka). Bidding ends when the three OTHER players have all passed on a bid; that bid wins, and its owner may play that contract or any higher one.

And here the family’s oldest bidding right is alive and well: standing, as you met it in Core Concepts. When your turn comes round again, you may say “I hold” and grab the contract somebody raised to, instead of bidding higher. You can only hold against players who come after you in the seat order, and here the order runs from the Forehand, who counts first even though they speak last, round to the dealer, who counts last. Hold as often as you like, or raise instead; if two players could hold the same bid, the one earlier in the order wins. Standing happens when the bidding reaches you, never out of turn. (The word players speak is obdržim, “I hold.”)

If the other three all pass, the Forehand chooses freely, and two contracts exist only for this moment, never in an open auction: Three (trojka, the cheapest called-king game, reserved as the Forehand’s consolation prize) or Dodge Round, the fallback nobody bids and everybody fears (below).

The open ladder runs cheapest first: each rung refuses a talon card and raises the price. These are the base contracts. The Expansions at the end of this chapter add more.

The next two contracts exist only when the other three players have all passed. The Forehand chooses one of them; neither is ever bid in an open auction.

Calling a King

In the called games (Three, Two and One) the Declarer names a suit out loud, and whoever holds that King is their secret partner, silent until the cards betray them. Calling your own King is legal (you’ll be secretly alone); calling a King that turns out to be in the talon also leaves you alone, with one famous consolation: the king-rescue. You may take the talon group that contains your called King (whatever its size in your contract). The untaken talon cards then wait face-down to the side instead of joining the defenders. Win a trick with that King later, and the waiting cards are tossed face-up onto it: they belong to whoever wins that trick. Rescue delivered, treasure recovered; King beaten, treasure lost.

The Talon

The talon is spread face-up in its dealt order and split, left to right, into groups the size of the contract: Three makes two groups of three cards, Two makes three groups of two, and One makes six groups of one, each group a single card. The Declarer takes exactly one whole group, never a card from here and a card from there. The rest goes face-down to the defenders’ pile. Then the Declarer discards the same number face-down into their own tricks. Kings and Trull cards may never be discarded; Taroks may go only as a last resort, when nothing else in your hand may legally leave it, and any Tarok you discard lies face-up for all to see. In solo brez the whole talon belongs to the defenders, sight unseen.

Bonuses and Announcements

The silent/announced rule from Core Concepts applies. After the exchange comes a round of announcements: beginning with the Declarer and circling counter-clockwise, each player in turn announces or passes, until three players in a row have passed.

Bonus	What it takes	Silent	Announced	Penalty
Trull (trula)	Skus, Moon and Pagat, all three in your tricks (captured, not held)	2	4	announced and failed: minus 4
Kings (kralji)	all four Kings in your tricks	2	4	announced and failed: minus 4
King Ultimo (kralj ultimo)	the called King wins the last trick	2	4	failed attempt: minus 2 silent, minus 4 announced
Pagat Ultimo (pagat ultimo)	the Pagat wins the last trick	5	10	failed attempt: minus 5 silent, minus 10 announced
Valat (valat)	win every trick	50	100	announced and failed: minus 100

Three pieces of fine print the whole country knows: an attempt only happens when the Pagat or the called King is actually PLAYED into the last trick, announced or not; keeping the Pagat in your hand is never an attempt and costs nothing. Play it there and lose it, though, and the silent rate books against your side. An announced Ultimo card must be saved for the last trick as long as the rules allow, laid face-up so everyone can watch you sweat. And a Valat swallows the whole hand: when one is won, nothing else is scored for either side, no distance, no other bonuses.

The Moon Problem

Slovenian Tarok’s signature dread: lose the Moon to the enemy Skus, or to the Pagat in an Emperor’s Trick, the only other card that can ever take it. The player who lost the Moon scores minus 4 in their own column; their partner is untouched, and nothing ever doubles it. It fires in every called and solo game (a Moon left in the talon counts as the Declarer’s loss), but never in the Dodge Round or the Beggar, and two mercies exist: a Moon saved by the king-rescue, and solo brez’s unseen talon. The whole table spends the whole evening knowing exactly where the Moon is, or wishing it did.

The Contracts in Play

Three, Two, One. The everyday called games, named for the number of talon cards you take: call a King, exchange, and bring your side to 36 of 70. The Forehand leads the first trick, whoever declared.

Solo three, two, one. These are the same games, but you fight all three opponents alone, with no called King to help, and the ladder pays you the higher solo prices for the courage.

Beggar. In the Beggar you play alone, and your promise is to win not a single trick. The Rising Rule is on, and no bonuses can be scored. And a custom overrides the usual etiquette here: tricks are not gathered face-down. Each player lays their played cards face-up in a growing line on their own side of the untouched talon, forming a cross on the table, so every card that has fallen stays visible. This game is a public autopsy, by design.

Solo without. You promise thirty-six Card Points with no talon and no partner, for a flat 16: no distance is scored, and no bonuses may be scored or announced. The Declarer leads. Bid it when a Beggar-shaped auction leaves your monster hand no other door.

Dodge Round. The fallback when nobody bids, and the reason timid tables learn courage. Everyone plays alone; the goal is to capture as FEW Card Points as possible, the Rising Rule is on, and the Pagat may only be played when nothing else is legal. The talon joins in: before each of the first six tricks, the top talon card is flipped face-up beside the table: a little “vitamin” that belongs to that trick’s winner, Card Points and all, in plain sight while everyone dodges.

Dodge Round scores differently from every other contract: everyone scores their own result. You score minus a fifth of your Card Points, rounded to the nearest whole number. If you took no trick at all, you score +14 Victory Points. But if you went over 35 you score −14 Victory Points, and nobody else scores anything that hand. The emptiest pile hurts the least, and that is the whole point of the contract.

Should you claim it?

Look over the cards you were dealt before the talon arrives: this section helps you judge which rung of the ladder they can reach.

Count your Taroks before the talon arrives: length and big cards both climb the ladder.

Bid Three (trojka) if you hold: four Taroks or more before the exchange, with a big Tarok (XV and up) or a Trull piece among them. Call a King and expect the partnership to add about two tricks. Slovenian tables bid Three on almost anything playable.

(Fine print: the arithmetic behind the four: an average hand holds five Taroks, so four with a big one is a below-average hand leaning on its partner.)

Climb to Two, One or a Solo only as your Tarok count climbs past five and then six, one extra big Tarok per rung as the price of one fewer talon card. For scale: the published advice for the Austrian sister game wants about seven trumps, headed by the top honors, before you play alone.

Bid the Beggar if you hold: a four-suited hand with no bare high face waiting to win a trick you don’t want. The Pagat is your safest Tarok here: it never beats another Tarok, and the rules keep it in your hand until it is your last one. One trap: if the Skus and the Moon land in the same trick, your forced Pagat wins it, and that is the classic way a Beggar dies.

Dodge Round is never a bid; it is the Forehand’s shelter when everybody else has passed.

The King insight: in Slovenian Tarok, like Calling the King, a lone King rarely gets trumped, so count it as nearly a whole trick.

Playing the Hand

In the Dodge Round and the called or solo games up to Solo one, the Forehand leads the first trick. From the Beggar upward, the Declarer leads. Then as always: follow the led suit, trump when void, and in the negative contracts beat the trick if you can. The Emperor’s Trick applies everywhere, and this is its homeland: when Skus, Moon and Pagat collide, the little one eats them both.

Scoring the Hand

The Declarer and the called partner push their piles together; in a solo, the three defenders pool theirs. Then count your side’s cards in three steps, the same rhythm as the other big games: count the cards, divide by three and round to the nearest (your base count), then add the pips (your pip count). Together the two counts are your side’s Card Points, of the deck’s 70.

How to count Card Points, base count and pip count: a worked example. The Declarer and the called partner push their piles together; the side gathers 25 cards: the full Trull (Skus, the Moon and the Pagat), two Kings, one Jack, and nineteen plain cards that fill out the pile. Step one, count the cards: 25. Step two, the base count: 25 ÷ 3 rounds to the nearest whole, 8. Step three, the pip count: 12 for the Trull, 8 for the two Kings, 1 for the Jack, nothing from the nineteen plain cards, so 21. Base count plus pip count: 8 + 21 = 29 of 70 Card Points, seven short of the 36 needed, so the contract has fallen and the Declarer’s side scores its minus.

Then the hand pays, and here Slovenia keeps its own beautiful ledger, unique in this book: only the Declarer’s side scores (both partners the same number), and the number carries a sign. Win, and it is plus. Fall, and the very same number is minus. The defenders score nothing at all; their reward is the minus they just carved into your column.

1. Step one, the contract: the Declarer’s side each score the contract’s value: plus if the contract was won, minus if it fell.
2. Step two, the distance: in the called and solo games (not the Beggar, not solo brez), the distance rides on the same sign: one Victory Point for every five Card Points between the result and the 35-line (round the raw distance to the nearest five first). Win with 45 and you score the contract plus 2; fall with only 25 and you score the contract plus 2 as one minus number. The further from the line, the bigger the swing, in whichever direction you earned.
3. Step three, the bonuses: every bonus books into the Declarer’s column too, each with its own sign, independent of the contract. The Declarer’s side earns one: plus. The Declarer’s side fails an announced one: minus. The DEFENDERS earn one: minus against the Declarer’s column. The defenders fail an announced one: plus for the Declarer. One column tells the whole story of the hand.

Play to 200 Victory Points, and end the session the traditional way: someone calls the Skus round (škis). From that hand on, watch who is dealt the Skus; when the deal next comes around to that player, their deal is the last hand of the night. The highest total takes the evening.

The contracts at a glance