Königrufen
Königrufen or Königsrufen is a four-player, trick-taking card game of the tarot family, played in Austria and South Tyrol, with a pack of 54 cards and variants for two, three and six players. As with other regional tarot card games, it is usually called Tarock by its players. It is the only variant of Tarock that is played over most of Austria and, in 2001, was the most popular card game in Austria after Schnapsen and Rommé. By 2015, it had become "the favourite card game of Austrians". It has been described as the most interesting tarot game for four players, the "Game of Kings", a game that requires intelligence and, with 22 trumps in play, as good "training for the brain".
In comparison with other card games, Königrufen may be played with a wide range of possible contracts. The name of the game comes from the practice in the most basic contracts of naming a specific King in order to choose a playing partner, known as "calling a King". In most contracts the four players form two sides – either two against two or one against three – who compete to score the majority of the card points. According to the rules, the 54 cards have a total value of 70 points.
Although the basic rules of Austrian Königrufen are common, the [|contract announcements] and [|bonuses] and their values have a large number of variations. Many individual regions and families play by their own house rules. In addition, more widely accepted tournament rules have emerged, although these vary considerably from region to region. This makes Königrufen the most varied of all the Tarock games. Regular tournament series have been held since the 1990s and, since 2008, an annual Austrian Final has taken place. Stronghold of the game is Upper Austria which also hosts the Austrian final.
In a broader sense, the term Königrufen may be used for a family of closely related tarot games whose other members are mainly played in other regions of the former Habsburg monarchy, most notably in Slovenia.
File:TarockSpiel.jpg|thumb|upright=2.0|Modern pack of Tarock cards by Piatnik; Industrie und Glück design, Type 6 by Josef Neumayer, 1890
History
Background
The original form of the Tarock card game family emerged in Northern Italy during the Early Renaissance, first evidenced in 1440. The most important feature of the new game was that 21 permanent trump cards, the trionfi, were added to the existing suits. Today these trump cards are also called Tarock in German-speaking countries and are usually numbered with Roman numerals. In addition to the trumps, a valuable card called the "Fool" was added, to which special rules applied. The Fool is often wrongly regarded as a precursor of the Joker in modern card games. Called L'Excuse in French, since it was played with a ritualized apology, it was later changed to Sküs in German.According to the oldest known French rules of 1637 Tarock was a trick-taking card game for three players using 78 cards of designated values, the players vying with each other to score as many points as possible. In its heyday from about 1730 to 1830 Tarock was played with this rule framework across a large part of Europe. In addition, variants were developed for four players with two teams of two – usually similar in principle to the game of Troccas that is still widespread today in Grisons.
From the middle of the 18th century onwards, especially in the German-speaking world and in the Habsburg monarchy, the Tarock game went through a series of profound reforms:
- The most important innovation, introduced by the Spanish card game L'Hombre, was the principle of bidding. Now players competed in an auction, before the actual game started, in order to be able to play against an alliance of the others, the defenders. From the four-player version of L'Hombre, Quadrille, came the idea of choosing a partner by "calling" for a King. Tarock variants such as the German Tarok Quadrille and the Italian Chiamare il re, whose name means the same as "Königrufen", were based on this principle.
- The 78-card pack was stripped to make it easier to handle by omitting the lowest suit cards. This is how the 54-card pack, now produced almost exclusively in Central Europe, was created. Other Tarock variants also stripped out various numbers of suit cards.
- The Sküs lost its role as a special card and became the 22nd and highest trump card, while retaining its high value as well as its form and name.
- A talon was introduced, possibly from other card games, from which the winner of the auction could improve his hand.
- As an additional element, a bonus was introduced when the smallest tarock, the Pagat, won the last trick. In Austria, a rule was added that this could also be announced before the game as "Pagat Ultimo" or "Pagat zum Schluss".
- The cards also changed in appearance: they used a French pack instead of Latin playing cards. The traditional motifs of the trump cards, known today mainly in the Tarot pack, were replaced by pictures of animals, vedute, social scenes or other images.
Emergence and development
The earliest reference to a four-handed variant of Tapp-Tarock involving the calling of a King occurs in an 1827 book, but by then it had presumably been played for several decades.Mayr and Sedlaczek, pp. 16–17 Königrufen was devised as a four-player variant of Tapp Tarock with each player being dealt 12 cards instead of 16, but the talon still comprising six cards. As in the variants mentioned above, the principle for choosing partners in Königrufen was adopted from Quadrille.The first description of Königrufen is found in 1827 in an appendix to the second edition of the book Anweisung zur gründlichen Erlernung des beliebten Tarok-Tappen-Spiels sowohl durch genaue Bestimmung aller Regeln und Feinheiten, als auch durch die Beobachtung und Auseinandersetzung mehrerer angeführter, sehr schwieriger Beyspiele. The first edition of 1821 had not mentioned Königrufen, from which it may be assumed that there had been a rise in the popularity of the game during the 1820s. Until recently, the second edition had been thought to have been lost; it was only made public in 2010, when the Lower Austrian State Library was able to acquire a copy from the Tax and Customs Museum in Rotterdam.
According to these rules, the 'forehand', i.e. the player who started the auction and led to the first trick, could announce a Tapper if he had a poor hand of cards. This was the lowest ranking contract in Tapp Tarock where the forehand was allowed to pick up all six cards from the talon if no one bid a higher contract. However, because it was all too easy to win, this contract was already obsolete in Tapp Tarock and was not actually played; instead a win was paid out to the player at a low rate; this was also done in Königrufen.
With better cards, the forehand could either call a King, announce a Dreyer or a Solo, which at that time did not mean the same as today's Solo Rufer but a Solo Dreier – where the declarer played alone against the other three without using cards from the talon. The other players could also bid these contracts.
Until the original source from 1827 had been recovered, the 1829 Neueste Allgemeine Spielbuch was the oldest known source for Königrufen which, as it turned out, contained an edited copy of the 1827 rules under the heading Tappen mit König oder Tarokrufen. From this, Tarock experts assumed that a King or a high tarock could be 'called' in the original form of the game. This turned out to be wrong with the appearance of the 1827 rules, in which only a King could be called. In the event that the called King was beaten by the opponents, a high penalty had to be paid. This was felt to be so harsh by Königrufen players that some of them used to call Tarock XX instead, the loss of which was far less of a worry and, if it were lost, was only of low value anyway. This is what the 1829 rules say:
This created a new line of Tarock games that developed into Zwanzigerrufen, Neunzehnerrufen and Hungarian Tarock. Meanwhile, in Königrufen, "King Capture" was usually scrapped, or if retained, its consequences were largely mitigated.
In 1840, the first book that dealt exclusively with Königrufen was published in Vienna: Thorough and easy-to-understand instructions for learning the popular game of Königrufen Tarock, or the art of learning to play the same in a short time, both theoretically and practically, according based on rules and examples. However, the rules differed considerably – in this description of Königrufen, players could only announce Rufer contracts, namely as a Dreier or as a Solo without talon. If you wanted to play alone, you could call a King in your own hand.
Different bidding contracts have survived a long time. In the book Der praktische Tarockspieler by Moriz Bermann three different contracts are presented, two of which correspond roughly to the above; in the third, two cards or even just one could be taken from the talon. However, a combination of Rufer and soloist games was to prevail, in each of which three cards from the talon or none could be played. In the 2nd edition of Sigmund Ulmann's Illustrirtem Wiener Tarokbuch, only the forehand could play a Rufer with talon and without further announcements. Above this, a Rufer with Pagat and a Solo Rufer without a talon could be played. Even higher in the auction was the Dreier, which had now freed itself meaningfully from the three talon cards and became the name for soloist games against three defenders; and the highest game was therefore the Solo Dreier without talon. By now, this was the basic structure of the game as it is today, with the difference that today, a Pagat Rufer always ranks higher than a Solo Rufer in the auction.