The School of Hartenjagen

 Except experience, which you will need to become a good player, you need to know a few tricks in order to win in a Hartenjagen game. Whether you play with your friends or online, for fun or money, the purpose of this game is to win and I will tell you how. Let us first cover the basics of Hartenjagen.

Hartenjagen is played with a full deck, except in Dutch Hartenjagen which is played with 32 starting from 7 as the lowest card and up to the ace as the highest card. The goal is to either avoid collecting penalty cards, every heart and queen of spades, or the total opposite, to collect all of them. The first tip and trick you need to know is at the very beginning of each round. As you may already know at the beginning of each round, except each fourth round, you deal three cards from your deck and pass it onto another player, and you also get three cards from another player. This is the part when you set your tactics, probably the most important part of the game.

By looking at your cards you may assume if you are going for the ultimate win by trying to collect all the cards or if you are going to try and avoid the penalty cards. Depending on the situation you should either pass low cards if you are collecting or pass on high cards if you are avoiding. That way you are set for the game, but again you may get bad cards from one of your opponents, so you need to take those cards into consideration. Try to balance out your cards, if you have a short color it might be a good idea to get rid of it, which is if you will not be taking the lead. If you have a long color you want to keep that color with you as it may prove to be of great benefit with both avoiding and collecting the cards.

The last thing you need to remember when playing Hartenjagen is when you find yourself in the situation when you must take the hand; always do so with the highest possible card if you are avoiding and the lowest possible card if you are collecting. Those would be the ground rules of Hartenjagen, everything else will come along with every Hartenjagen game you play.