Your first three hands of Tarok, played card by card. No rules reading required.
Don’t shuffle
This deck is set for hand one. The cards are presorted to match this guide, so don’t shuffle or cut them.
Calling the Twenty
Welcome to Tarok
Tarok is a family of card games from the Alps, and it has its own special deck like the one in your hands. This deck comes presorted for a guided game of Calling the Twenty. You deal it, play three hands along with this page, and learn the game as you play.
What you need
You need four players, this deck, a pen and about 45 minutes.
Setup
Take your seats
Take a seat around a table, as shown in the picture. The seats are Player 1 to Player 4, clockwise, or P1 to P4 for short. Player 4 is the Dealer for all three hands tonight.
The deal
Normally the deal passes to the left after every hand. The player to the Dealer’s left, Player 1, is the “Forehand”.
- Deal
- Bid
- Play
- Count
- Score
Get the ten cards for your seat.
Today you deal in blocks of ten
Player 4 deals face up, without shuffling.
- Take the info card off the top.
- Give the next ten cards to Player 1, then ten each to Players 2, 3 and 4.
- Put the remaining fourteen cards back in the box.
the deck, the info card on top
- P1
10 - P2
10 - P3
10 - P4
10 
14to the box
The Cards
Your hands should look like this. For the sake of teaching, we will play the first hands open, so every player places the cards in front of them on the table. Normally, the other players not knowing what you play in your hands is a key element of the game, and talking about one’s hand is forbidden.
All three hands tonight use these same cards.
P1 Forehand
P2
P3
P4 Dealer
The Deck
The cards in your hands
Your cards come in two kinds. Twenty of the forty are color cards, from the four French suits you know: Hearts, Diamonds, Spades and Clubs. Each suit has five cards tonight, ranked from the highest: King, Queen, Cavalier, Jack, and one number card, the 1 in the red suits and the 10 in the black ones. The Cavalier, a kind of knight, is a fourth face card found in Tarok games.
The other kind is the Taroks, the cards with Roman numerals. In this game there are twenty of them: the I (held by P3), then the IV up to the XXI, and the Skus (held by P1), which carries a star instead of a numeral and is the highest Tarok. In most contracts the Taroks are trumps, meaning they are stronger than the color cards.