Alpine Tarok

The deck has 5 suits: the four classic French suits, Clubs, Spades, Hearts and Diamonds, and the Tarok suit.

In tables and examples, cards are written the way the deck prints them: Q is the Queen of Spades, 1 the 1 of Hearts, and the Taroks go by their Roman numerals, so the XVIII is Tarok eighteen.

The Standard Suits

We start with the four color suits. Each color suit has only 8 cards: 4 face cards and 4 number cards.

Besides the Jack, the Queen and the King, Tarok has a fourth face card: the Cavalier. It ranks between the Queen and the Jack.

You recognize a Cavalier by the horse and the letter C in its index.

Each suit also has only 4 number cards, and the red suits and the black suits have different ones:

The number cards also rank in a different order in the red suits and in the black suits. The pips (the small suit symbols printed on each card) have small arrows that show the order, and the “Ranking” section of this page explains both orders.

Hearts

lowest rankhighest rank

Spades

lowest rankhighest rank

The Tarok Suit

The Taroks are numbered with Roman numerals, and each of them shows an animal of the Alps. The higher the Tarok, the higher its animal stands in the natural hierarchy: the wolf (XX) ranks far above the hare (X). This helps you see a card’s ranking at a glance. The Tarok suit has 21 numbered cards, plus one extra card with star indices.

Some cards in the Tarok suit carry names and belong to named sets. Here they are:

The first four Taroks, I to IV, are called the Birds.

The Birds matter in play: several games have bonuses for exactly these cards. You will meet these bonuses in the rules of the individual games.

The highest numbered Tarok is the XXI, called the Moon (note the small moon on the card). Its Brown Bear is the highest animal in the deck. The name comes from a confusion of words: the French le monde, the world, was taken for the German Mond, the moon. It is common for the XXI of a Tarok deck to carry a small moon.

The highest-ranking card of the Tarok suit is the Skus (Sküs in German, škis in Slovenian, Skíz in Hungarian; the name comes from the French Excuse). It is the most powerful card in the deck and beats every other card, with one exception that Core Concepts explains. Its Edelweiss is a flower of the Alps.

The second named set is the Trull: the Pagat, the Moon and the Skus. Several bonuses in the rules of the individual games are about these three cards.

Ranking and Card Values

Every card has two properties:

The first is the card’s ranking: whether it wins or loses a trick against other cards.

The second is the card’s worth: the Card Points a player gains by capturing that card in a trick.

Ranking

A Tarok beats any card of a color suit. Within the Tarok suit, the higher the Roman numeral, the stronger the card. The Skus () is the strongest Tarok and beats all the others.

In the color suits, the black suits and the red suits rank their number cards in different orders:

Example: the 10 beats the 7 but is beaten by the K.

In Hearts and Diamonds the number cards rank the other way round: the 1 is the highest number card and the 4 is the lowest. This is the hard part of the ranking, so take a moment to remember it.

Example: the 2 beats the 4 but is beaten by the Q.

The deck helps you with the two orders: the small arrows in the pips show which way the number cards rank.

The courts rank alike in all four suits, above the number cards: Jack, Cavalier, Queen, King, ascending.

Hearts

1 2 3 4

Diamonds

1 2 3 4

Spades

10 9 8 7

Clubs

10 9 8 7

Card Values

A card’s worth counts at the end of every hand, when the players count the cards they captured. The most valuable cards show their worth: count the small pips printed on their sides.

Have a look at your cards: the King shows 4 pips, the Queen 3, and the Trull cards each carry 4 star pips.

Rank and pips do different jobs. A card’s rank decides who wins the trick. Its pips decide how much extra the card is worth to the player who captures it.

Each game counts the captured cards in its own way and then adds the pips. Each game’s rules explain its count with a worked example.

There are two kinds of points. Card Points win the hand, and Victory Points win the evening. Every contract and every bonus is scored in Victory Points, and the score sheet keeps count of them. You score Victory Points by delivering the contract you chose, and through bonuses, which almost any player can score. Core Concepts explains both kinds of points.

The deck has one more design choice: every card face stands on a clean white background, so that you can read a card from across the table. We tested this in play by counting how often players leaned forward to read a card.

Your guided first game Ready to play: the Alpine Tarok deck ships presorted for your guided first game. Start the guided first game

About the designer

The Alpine Tarok deck was designed by Greg Lichtensteiner of Elsteiner Games as a modern take on the traditional Tarok deck, with a focus on ease of use. Greg is Austrian-American. When he wanted to take his Tarok games with him, he found them harder to explain than they need to be. So he put player aids and mnemonic devices on the cards themselves: the pips show how many Card Points a card is worth, small arrows show which way the number cards rank, and the animals on the Taroks rise with the rank of the card. They are there to make the games easier to teach.