Dappen · the village versions of the Black Forest
The Dappen rules teach one Dappen: the version the Klausmann family plays in Furtwangen, tidied a little so that it sits beside the other five games without jolting you. That is the friendly core, and it is enough for a full evening. This page is the rest of the map. Dappen is not one game with a rulebook; it is a handful of village games that survived in a handful of kitchens, and the differences between them are what makes them worth knowing.
Who still plays
Achim Laber, the Black Forest ranger behind cego.de, went looking for the last Dappen tables in 2024 and found them in Buchenbach near Freiburg, in Breitnau in the High Black Forest, and around Furtwangen, where a family circle plays regularly and a group of older women meets once a month in a pub. The game has already died out in Schollach, Schwärzenbach, Unterbränd, Hinterzarten and St. Märgen. Until Laber tracked the players down, no card-game researcher outside the region knew Dappen existed. Every rule below exists because somebody remembered it and somebody else wrote it down.
Furtwangen: the version the main rules teach
Furtwangen has three bids, in order: Solo, Dapp (players say ich hab en Dapp) and the Challenge (players say ich streck). Everything the main rules print about the trump-stop duty and the second-to-last duty is Furtwangen’s, including the open-ended ladder of trump stops: the Skus alone, the XXI with at least one other Tarok, the XX with at least two, the XIX with at least three, and on down, one more Tarok for each step.
Furtwangen differs from the base rules in five places, and the Expansions give each Furtwangen original.
“Steckt jemand?” A player forced to take the Dapp by the second-to-last duty asks the table that question, “is anyone stretching?”, before looking at the Dapp cards. So in Furtwangen even a drafted Dapper can be Challenged, where the main rules shield the drafted player. Only the last player to speak may Challenge then. pagat.com notes why the original is kinder than it sounds: a forced bidder can hand the Dapp to the Challenger and rest easy, because a second bidder cannot then sweep every trick.
The finale. Laid-out Ultimos in Furtwangen do not sit in fixed tricks. They are laid face-up before the first card and must then win the last tricks of the hand, in descending order, the III before the II before the Pagat. A lone III Ultimo must win the last trick. Lay out the III and the Pagat together, and the III must win the second-to-last trick and the Pagat the last; lay out the III and the II, and the II takes the last. The main rules’ fixed tricks (the III third-to-last, the II second-to-last, the Pagat last) match the Ultimo pattern of the other games. The values go with the card either way. Pick one and stay with it.
Holding the Skus (gstiesieren). In Furtwangen this is a core rule, not an option, and the main rules keep it as an expansion. An opponent of the Dapper whose only Tarok is the Skus may hold it back when a Tarok must be played and play a color card instead. From then on the Skus can win nothing. It is shown at the last trick and goes to the team’s pile whoever wins that trick, so the team counts its Card Points. If the Dapper wins that last trick, the team gives the Dapper one card from its pile in return, a card without pips if it has one. The rule is also played in Schollach, Waldau and Schwärzenbach, and nowhere else on record.
The missed duty. If the play shows that a player passed while holding a trump stop, the hand stops at once, and every other player adds 8 Victory Points, the bottom row of the Dapp column, before the deal moves on.
No Fairy Tale Trick. In the Black Forest the Skus is the highest Tarok and wins whenever it is played; the main rules keep the Fairy Tale Trick on. More on that below.
One smaller Furtwangen detail the main rules leave out: Ultimos may be laid out in any contract, the Solo included.
Breitnau: the Push
Breitnau has four steps rather than three, and its extra step is a further raise. After a Dapp and a Challenge, the first bidder may answer “I’ll keep it” (selber, myself), and the Challenger may then raise once more with the Push (Stupfen). The first bidder answers “I’ll keep it” again or hands the Dapp over. That is the ceiling.
Breitnau has no compulsory Dapp at all. If everybody passes in the second round, the hand “falls into the hole” (das Spiel kommt ins Loch): the cards are thrown in, and the next player deals. There are no Ultimos and no Holding the Skus. The 12 Dapp cards count for the lone player, with one exception the main rules follow too: if the opponents win every single trick, the Dapp cards go to them and the Dapper has nothing.
Traditional values: the difference between the loser’s Card Points and 40 is multiplied first and only then rounded up to the next full 10 cents. The multipliers are 2 for a Solo, won or lost, 1 for a Dapp, 2 after a Challenge and 3 after a Push. The main rules pay the Push from their Dapp column, times three.
Buchenbach: the Kings ladder
Buchenbach is for six players only, and it has two habits no other village shares.
The first is in round one. After a Solo, a later player may stretch, the Challenge word, to take the Dapp, and that ends the bidding; the Solo player cannot bid again. In the main rules there is no Challenge against a Solo.
The second is in round two, which is a true overcall ladder with entry requirements. After a Dapp, a later player does not Challenge but bids One King, and the bids climb from there:
| Bid | Requirement | Multiplier on the Dapp column |
|---|---|---|
| Dapp | none | ×1 |
| One King (Ein Hannes) | at least one King | ×2 |
| Two Kings (Zwei Hannes) | at least two Kings, and only after a One King | ×3 |
| Goat (Geiß) | the Pagat, which the Black Forest calls the Goat, and only after a Two Kings | ×4 |
Hannes is short for Johannes, though it may have started life as the French honneurs, honours. You may only bid the next step up, never skip one, and an outbid player may keep the contract with “I’ll keep it” (selber) only if they hold the cards the higher bid asks for. Nobody can keep the contract against a Goat, because there is only one Pagat. The hand pays at the last bid made, whoever plays it.
Buchenbach also constrains the opening. In the first trick the holder of the Skus must play it, in the second the holder of the XXI, and in the third the holder of the Pagat. Everyone else must play a Tarok without pips if they have one, and for these three tricks the duty to play a Tarok outranks the duty to follow suit. It is the same ceremony as the geregelter Räuber in Cego. Breitnau and Buchenbach both play without Ultimos and without Holding the Skus.
The lost villages
Schollach (six players, died out around 2004) had Solo, Dapp and the Challenge, no Push, Holding the Skus allowed, and no Ultimos.
Waldau (six players, died out in the 1970s) had two bids, the Solo and a Solo that carried an Ultimo, where the Ultimo could only ever be the Pagat on the last trick, never the II or the III. A player could then say ich sag an to take the Dapp, and a later player could Challenge. Holding the Skus was allowed, and a team that lost every trick was Berg. The table may have played with only 52 cards and a Dapp of 10. The records do not say whether the first bidder could keep the contract against a Challenge, or whether Ultimos could be laid out in a Dapp.
Schwärzenbach was played by six or seven players, with Holding the Skus allowed. The players have died, and nothing further survives. Haslach in the Kinzig valley is reported by a witness who watched but never played, and no Haslach rules are recorded.
Where the two rule sources disagree
Both come from the same 2024 research team, and they still differ in two places.
- Buchenbach’s Solo. Laber’s rule sheet says a Solo wins double and loses single. pagat.com prints the reverse, single when won and double when lost. Furtwangen’s Solo is win-double, lose-single in both sources, which makes Laber’s reading the more likely of the two.
- Who pays a swept Challenge. Laber’s sheet says the original Dapp bidder pays half the sweep alone. pagat.com’s main text says the other bidder pays the whole amount for the team, and lists the half as a local variation.
No fairy tales in the Forest
The Fairy Tale Trick, the one trick in which the Pagat beats the Skus, appears in none of the five documented villages, and in no version of Cego either. In the Black Forest the Skus simply wins. The main rules keep the trick switched on; switch it off for full Black Forest authenticity. No Victory Point value changes either way.
What the main rules teach, and why
Furtwangen, because it is the only version a research team sat down and played card by card, and the only one still being taught to children. The main rules depart from it in declared places only: fixed Ultimo tricks instead of the compressed finale, a shielded drafted Dapper instead of “Steckt jemand?”, the Fairy Tale Trick left on, and Holding the Skus and the missed-duty payment moved to the Expansions. Everything else in the main rules is Furtwangen as the Klausmanns play it. The main rules’ Simplified tiers are their own adaptation of the Furtwangen cent values, close to them but not an exact conversion, and the cent values are shown in full on the Traditional Scoring Tables page.
Back to the rules: the Dappen rules, “The Bidding”, and its Expansions entries “The Furtwangen Ultimos”, “Challenging the drafted Dapper”, “The missed duty”, “No Fairy Tale Trick”, “Holding the Skus” and “The village bids”.
Sources
- Achim Laber, Das Dappen, rules of Breitnau, Buchenbach and Furtwangen, Hinterzarten, 11 July 2024; with thanks to Willi Wangler, Thomas Eckmann and Margit Klausmann.
- pagat.com: Dappen, John McLeod, based on Ulf Martin’s German page and on play in Schönenbach, Furtwangen, 3 July 2024. Sections used: Furtwangen, Breitnau, Buchenbach, Other Black Forest variants.
- cego.de: Regeln, Achim Laber, for where the game is still played and where it has died out.