The

Tarock Tarot games are card games played with tarot decks, that is, decks with numbered permanent trumps parallel to the suit cards. The games and decks which English-speakers call by the French name Tarot are called Tarocchi in the original Italian, ...

card game family is represented in

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

by a variant for four players that uses a 42-card deck, variously called Hungarian Tarock ( hu, Húszashívásos tarokk), Hungarian Tarokk or Paskievics (german: Paskiewitsch in Austrian sources). According to McLeod "interest in this fine game may again be increasing."''Hungarian Tarokk''
at

pagat.com Pagat.com is a website containing rules to hundreds of card games from all over the world. Maintained by John McLeod, it contains information for traditional, commercial, and newly invented card games from all over the world. It has been described ...

. Retrieved 1 August 2021.

Names and history

According to research by

card game A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card ga ...

experts, Hungarian Tarock originated in the 19th century from a variant of the Austrian game,

Zwanzigerrufen Zwanzigerrufen or Zwanz'gerrufen is the leading trick-taking card game of the Tarock family in many regions of eastern Austria. Its rules are simpler than the game of Königrufen which is more widely played in the whole of Austria. As is common in ...

("Call Twenty"). This is plausible, because its native name, ''Húszashívásos tarokk'', means "Call Twenty Tarock", and also because there are major similarities between the two games, albeit they differ greatly in the way they are played. The other common name for the game is ''Paskievics'' (in old Austrian sources ''Paskiewitsch''), named after Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich who, as the Russian commander-in-chief in 1848 contributed significantly to the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. This may be why 48 points are needed to win the game (depending on the sub-variant). In the 1920s, ''Károly Lingel'' and ''Lajos Polyák'' developed a refined version with several additional contracts which, according to tarock players, greatly increase the fun of the game. This variation was widely played in Hungary as Illustrated ungarianTarock (''Illusztrált tarokk'') or Palatine Tarock (''Palatinusz tarokk''). In the late 20th century, Dr. Endre Kovács, the most famous expert on the game, developed another variant, High Tarock (''Magas tarokk''), with 10 additional contracts. However, it did not take off. Royal Tarock, developed by Zoltán Gerots with 70 bonuses and contracts, deviates quite strongly from Hungarian Tarock, because two cards are removed and also card values are omitted. This variant, like Austrian Zwanzigerrufen, is played with 10 cards in the hand and no talon, but with all 22 tarocks. Only four cards of the two red suits remain. The cards no longer have a point value; instead the tricks won are awarded bonuses. Royal Tarock is usually played with pre-determined partnerships. However, the partners sit next to each other, not opposite one other as in Bridge and Ottocento. Around the turn of the millennium, the game was imported to

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

where it enjoys increasing popularity at least in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

. This is essentially the Illustrated Hungarian Tarock with some contracts from High Tarock. To avoid confusion with an Austrian three-player variant, also called

Illustrated Tarock Illustrated Tarock (german: Illustriertes Tarock) or Illustrated Dreiertarock is an Austrian card game that has been described as the "queen" of all three-handed Tarock games played with the 54-card pack. It was thought by Mayr and Sedlaczek to ...

, Austrian Tarock experts gave the game the name Illustrated Zwanzigerrufen (''Illustriertes Zwanzigerrufen'').

References

External links

''Hungarian Tarock''
at

(English)
Illustrated Zwanzigerrufen in the Tarock column of the Viennese newspaper, the ''Wiener Zeitung''
Hungarian card games German deck card games Tarock card games Four-player card games {{card-game-stub