Durak

Also known as Podkidnoy Durak, Fool

Players

2-6 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 36 cards (6 up to ace in each suit)

Time

15-30 minutes

Difficulty

Easy

Category

Shedding

Setup

Strip a standard pack of everything below the six, leaving thirty-six cards. Inside a suit the order is the ordinary one, six lowest through ace highest. Cards carry no point values whatever; they exist only to be compared with one another.

Two to six can play and four is the number the game sits best at. Do the arithmetic before you sit down, because six hands of six cards use all thirty-six and leave no talon whatever. The game still works: the dealer's own last card is the one turned for trumps, everyone gets a look at it, and the dealer then takes it into hand with their other five. Five players leaves a talon of six. A full 52-card pack is available for either count and is described below, but one account calls that form very rare and says thirty-six is the normal pack.

Cut for the first dealer, low card dealing. Deal six cards to each player, going clockwise. Turn the next card face up, lay it on the table, and set the rest of the pack down across it so a corner of it stays in view. That card fixes the trump suit for the whole deal, and it is also the very last card anyone will be able to draw. The pile is the talon.

On the first deal of a session, whoever holds the lowest trump attacks first — the six, shown to prove the claim if the table wants proof. If it is in the talon, the trump seven starts instead, and failing that the eight, and so on up. Nobody redeals over it. Holding the lowest trump does not oblige you to open with it; attack with whatever you like. On later deals whoever was the fool last time takes the pack and deals, and the attack then falls to the player on their left rather than to them.

The lowest trump in the pack — the six in the 36-card game — buys its holder the turned-up trump: put the six under the talon, take the turn-up into hand. You may do it at any time before the talon runs out, and only if the six was dealt to you or drawn by you. Pick it up from a defence you lost and the right does not come with it.

There is no score sheet and nothing to write down. A deal simply runs until one player is left holding cards.

Play

A deal is a run of bouts. In each bout one player attacks one other, and the defender is always the player to the attacker's left. Everyone else at the table is a potential attacker.

The attack. The principal attacker lays one card from hand, face up, where the defender can reach it. Nothing is being led and nothing is being won: no suit has to be followed, the card competes with nothing, and it is simply a problem the defender now has to solve.

The defence. To beat a card, cover it with something stronger: within its own suit, anything ranking above it; failing that, any trump. Once a trump is on the table only a higher trump will beat it. Beaten cards and the cards that beat them stay on the table in pairs where everybody can read them.

Throwing in. As soon as a bout is under way, any card of a rank that already appears somewhere on the table may be added to the attack — the ranks of the defending cards count too, not just the attack cards. The principal attacker may keep throwing in, and so may the other players, which is where the game's usual name comes from: podkidnoy means thrown in. The principal attacker always has first refusal; once they pass, the others may throw in, taking their turn clockwise from the defender's left. Each new card has to be beaten separately.

Two limits, and neither is optional. A bout may never contain more than six attacking cards in total. It also may never contain more attacking cards than the defender held in hand when the bout opened — count them at that moment, not later, so a defender who started the bout with two cards faces at most two. Many tables cap the opening bout of a deal at five attacking cards, since defending first in a crowded game is punishing enough on its own.

Ending a bout. There are exactly two outcomes and they could not be more different. If the defender covers everything and the attackers have nothing left to throw in or decline to continue, the defence held: the whole heap goes face down onto a discard pile that nobody ever touches again, and those cards are gone from the deal. If the defender gives up at any point, they take every card on the table into hand, including the ones they had already beaten, and are that much further from getting rid of them.

Refilling. Between bouts everyone tops their hand back up to six from the talon. The order matters once the talon is nearly empty: the principal attacker draws first, then everyone else in clockwise order from them, and the defender last of all, however few cards that leaves. Nobody draws once the talon is exhausted, and the face-up trump is the final card taken.

Who attacks next. A defender who held takes over the attack, aiming the next bout at the player on their own left. A defender who picked up is passed over: the attack skips them and falls to the player beyond.

The endgame. Any player whose hand empties, with no talon left to refill from, is finished and drops out; the rest carry on around the gap. Play continues until one person is still holding cards.

Goal & scoring

Nobody wins Durak. Everyone who empties their hand while cards are still moving walks away clean, and the single player left holding cards at the end is the durak — the fool. That is the whole result of a deal.

Two things follow from a game shaped that way. There is no score, no ranking of the players who got out, and nothing to argue about afterwards; the fool traditionally shuffles and deals the next hand, often with the pack pushed at them. And because nothing is being collected, a bout you defend brilliantly is worth precisely nothing in itself. The only question that ever matters is whether cards left your hand or arrived in it.

Once the talon is empty the character of the game changes completely. Hands stop being replenished, so every pick-up is permanent damage, and the player who can force an opponent to take three cards near the end has usually decided the deal. Trumps hoarded through the early bouts are what make that possible, which is the standing tension of the game: a trump spent to defend cheaply is a trump you no longer have to attack with.

A deal can also end with no fool at all. Nothing finishes mid-bout, so if the last attack is beaten off and nobody is left holding a card — the attacker spent everything attacking, the defender everything defending — the hand is simply drawn.

Where a running tally is wanted, write down who was the fool each deal and play an agreed number of deals, or until somebody has been the fool a set number of times.

Variants

Perevodnoy Durak (passing on) — The best-known variation, and the one that most changes how a bout feels. Instead of beating the attack or picking it up, a defender holding a card of the same rank as the attack card may play it alongside and shove the whole attack sideways onto the next player, who becomes the defender. That player may add a further matching card and pass it on again, so an attack of one card can arrive at the fourth seat as an attack of four. What stops it is the ordinary six-card ceiling: once six cards are on the table nothing more can be thrown in and nothing more can be transferred, and the cards already beaten still count towards the six. A further form lets a defender transfer by merely showing a trump of the matching rank, keeping the card. Always played as individuals, never in partnerships.

Team Durak — Four players in two partnerships seated alternately, or six in two teams of three. Partners never attack one another, and they do throw in to help each other's attacks, so the six-card cap becomes a coordinated weapon rather than an individual one. A side is finished when both or all three of its members are out, and the losing partnership are the fools together. Signalling is not allowed, but discarding to help a partner obviously is, which gives the partnership game a cooperative texture the free-for-all does not have.

52-card Durak — For five or six players, the full pack can be used instead, with the two low and the ace high, still six cards each. One account records this as very rare and says thirty-six cards are the normal pack even at those numbers, so it is worth agreeing rather than assuming. The extra sixteen cards stretch every suit out, so a middling card is far less likely to hold, and they guarantee a talon at six players where the 36-card game has none. The swappable lowest trump becomes the two rather than the six. Attacking, defending and throwing in are unchanged.

• classic
• family-friendly
• quick
• strategy
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Official Game Rules, Gambiter, Wikibooks Card Games, Nordic Card Games, PlayJoy, Group Games 101.