Welcome to Kierki!

Hey there! Have you ever heard of Kierki? It’s a really cool game that you can play with 3 of your friends. The goal of the game is pretty simple: you want to have the most points by the end. Kierki is made up of two parts. The first part has 7 rounds, and in each round, you want to avoid taking any tricks. The second part has 4 rounds and a game called Fan Tan.

Let’s Get Started!

First things first, we need to set up the game. To decide who goes first, just choose someone randomly. Then, for each round, we’ll pass the dealer role to the person on the left. The dealer will shuffle the deck and give each player 13 cards, one at a time, going in a clockwise direction. Easy peasy!

How the Cards Rank

In Kierki, the ranking of the cards is pretty standard. The Ace is the highest, followed by the King, Queen, Jack, and so on, all the way down to 2. In the first part of the game, we don’t have a trump suit, but in the second part, we’ll choose a new trump suit for each round, and it’ll beat all the other suits. Got it?

GAMEPLAY

Let me tell you about the exciting game of Fan Tan. It’s divided into two parts: Rozgrywka and Odgrywka. In the first half, Rozgrywka, the goal is quite interesting – you actually don’t want to win any tricks!

Rozgrywka

In Rozgrywka, there are 7 deals to play. The twist here is that there are no trumps involved. Each deal has a total of 13 tricks up for grabs. The scorekeeping during this half works a little differently – instead of earning points, you actually collect negative points. And here’s the tricky part, the number of negative points you get can vary from deal to deal.

I’m going to explain how the game deals are played. First, let me tell you that the deals go in a clockwise direction, starting with the player to the left of the dealer. Each player takes a turn leading a card to the trick, and the other players have to follow suit. When it’s your turn to follow, remember to play a card of the same suit if you can. But if you don’t have a card of the same suit, you can play any card you want. The tricky part is that you don’t want to win any tricks in this half of the game. The player who plays the highest card of the suit led wins the trick and gets to lead the next trick.

Let’s talk about scoring now.

The way points are scored depends on which deal you’re playing. Points are added up as the game goes on, and you can even have a negative score.

In the first deal, each trick you win is worth negative 20 points.

In the second deal, each heart you win is worth negative 20 points. And for this deal, you can’t lead with hearts unless you have no other options.

Let me break down the rules for you:

In the third round, each queen you win will put you in the hole by 60 points.

In the fourth round, every jack or king you win will cost you 30 points apiece.

Now, pay attention to the fifth round because things get a little tricky. The only card that will penalize you is the king of hearts. If you win it, you’ll lose a whopping 150 points. Oh, and one more thing, in this round, you can only lead with hearts if you have no other choice.

In the sixth round, you’ll want to be careful with the seventh and last tricks because they come with a penalty. If you win either of those tricks, you’ll lose 75 points.

The seventh round is where all the penalties from previous rounds come together. So, if you incur penalties from multiple tricks or cards, you’ll be hit with all of them. And just like in rounds 2 and 5, leading with hearts is a no-go unless it’s your only option.

Now, let’s talk about points. In the first half of the game, you can lose a total of 2600 points. Yeah, that’s a big hit.

The Showdown

In the second half of the game, you and the other players compete to earn points by winning tricks and finishing a game of Fan Tan. The first part of this half includes 4 deals, followed by a secondary game called the little lottery.

During the deals, the dealer begins by dealing out the first 5 cards and then passes the dealing to the next player. The dealer looks at their 5-card hand and chooses a trump suit based on their cards. Then, the dealer continues dealing cards to each player until everyone has a 13-card hand.

So, here’s how it goes. We start the game by having the dealer lead a card to the trick. And then, it’s our turn to play. And guess what? We gotta remember to follow suit if we can. But, if we can’t, then we can play any card we want. The main goal here is to win tricks, remember? Now, the player who played the highest trump gets to be the winner of the trick. But wait, what if there are no trumps? Well, in that case, the trick goes to the player with the highest card of the suit that was led. And you know what’s awesome? The winner gets a nice little treat of 25 points for winning the trick. Plus, they also get to lead the next trick. How cool is that?

Once the fourth deal is finished, it’s time for the little lottery to begin. We start by dealing and playing cards following the rules of Fan Tan. The objective is to get rid of all our cards by placing them into the layout.

The dealer kicks off the game, and the first card to be played in each suit is a 7. Once a suit is started, we can continue by playing the next higher or lower ranked card into the layout. Remember, if we can’t play a card, it’s the next player’s turn.

The first person to play all their cards wins 800 points, while the second person to do so earns 500 points. This means a total of 2600 points are up for grabs in the second half of the game.

The End of the Game

The game concludes once the second player plays out their hand in the little lottery. At this point, we tally up our scores and compare them. The player with the highest score emerges as the victor!