German card game skat12/27/2023 They are the ones who contributed to turning the game into a popular pastime. While waiting for combat, the soldiers spent a lot of time playing cards. Involving half a million soldiers and resulting in 127,000 casualties, it went down in history as the largest battle in Europe before World War I. That year, thousands of soldiers were stationed in Altenburg in preparation for the Battle of Leipzig during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1813, court chamberlain Hans Carl Leopold von der Gabelentz, an administrator from the Thuringian city of Altenburg, near Leipzig, wrote down in a notebook his wins and losses for a game called "scat." It's the oldest known written reference to the card game. You need to be able to calculate in your head a good skat player obviously counts the cards passing in every round." German-suited cards have acorns, leaves, hearts and bells Image: Martin Schutt/dpa/picture-alliance/ dpa How it started "And the winner is always the one who has more as half of the points," explains Ehlers.įor him and for many other skat fans, the skill factor is more important than the chance factor in this game. Each card has a certain value, and the whole game is worth 120 points. Traditionally, German-suited playing cards -with acorns, leaves, hearts, bells - were used, but the internationally widespread French-suited ones work as well, leaving out a number of cards as there are only 32 in the game. The players in the defending team, however, cannot communicate with each other - except through the cards they decide to play. The highest bidder plays solo against the two others, who form a temporary alliance for the round. It involves an auction at the beginning of each round, based on each player's prospect of winning according to the cards they've been dealt. Skat is a three-player strategy card game. Jan Ehlers contributed to having skat listed as a German UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage asset Image: Elizabeth Grenier/DWĪs the former deputy president of the German Skat Association, Ehlers promoted the successful bid to have the game listed by the German branch of UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016. In Berlin alone there are 200 associations meeting up at least once a week to play, says Ehlers. "With poker, you can watch other people play for a half hour and then you can play, whereas most people play skat their whole life and they still don't get it," says skat expert Jan Ehlers.īut even with its seemingly puzzling rules, there are more people who play skat than football in Germany: some 20 to 25 million, according to the estimates of the German Skat Association. But to be honest, as a Canadian who's been living for 15 years in Germany and who's otherwise well integrated in the country, it's nice to know I still have something left to learn that would "make me even more German": how to play skat.Īnd to my defense, it's not a game you can simply pick up through observation. To start out, full disclosure: I'm not sure I'll ever learn.
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