Klaverjassen, the Game of Tactics

The game went through some changes and now is one of the most difficult games to fully comprehend, while at the same time it is one of the easiest games to learn. But once you start playing Klaverjassen you will see that there are tons of tips and tricks and mind blowing moves and tactics that you will discover in time. All of those plus a team to play against make Klaverjassen a very thrilling and interesting game. With that being said we will walk through some of the basics of this popular card game.

The game uses 32 cards, all four colors starting from 7 to the ace as the highest card. The game usually consists of 16 rounds, which you will play together with your partner against two other players; the goal is to collect more points than the opposite team. You can score points in different ways, first of there is the bidding. The player left of the dealer starts the bidding, the player that chooses a trump and his team must take more than half of the available points to score anything, if they fail to do that they will have a big zero on their sheet. The other team gets all the points scored, and if the bidding team fails to get more than half of the points than the other team will collect all of the points in that round.

You can score points either by taking tricks or by collecting bonus points. In every round there is a trump card chosen by one of the players, taking the trump suite cards will score you more points than other taking tricks in other suits. So the best idea would be to concentrate on taking the trump cards that score points, but you can’t neglect other cards. Bonus points are made by collecting a certain combination of cards. For an example if you take four jacks in Klaverjassen you will score 200 bonus points, which is more than the total number of points that can be scored in one round, so you need to pay attention to bonus points.

Klaverjassen offers plenty of interesting things, signaling is one of the ways to win a game, but you will have to learn to signal through cards. Plenty of tactics plays are there to learn, but once you start playing Klaverjassen you fall in love with the game and learning becomes a need.