This game value is calculated based on a number of factors, but most importantly, which Jacks the player possesses. The auction is held based upon the player's hand's Game Value, which determines the maximum bid a player can make in the auction. This one is an auction that determines which of the three players will play alone against the other two, who will defend as a team and try to prevent the soloist from scoring any points at all. Many games have an auction system, which determine any number of things. This creates a very interesting element of decision making when trying to decide which cards to sacrifice to mitigate losses. So despite the Jack being the strongest card, it's also the weakest scoring one. Throughout the game you also declare a trump suit, which by itself isn't that strange for trick taking games, where it gets weird is the fact that the Jacks are all part of the trump suit, regardless of what suit it is, and they're always higher ranked than everything else, even the other trumps. Knowing all this, it now means we have an ordering that looks like this: Not only is the ordering of the cards different from what most people are used to, all the Jacks are trumps, but not just that! They're trumps in a specific order:Ĭlubs beat Spades, Spades beat Hearts, and Hearts beat Diamonds. I later came to learn that there's an entire family of card games referred simply to as "Ace-10" games because of this ordering. Which means the ranking (disregarding trumps) is A, 10, K, Q, J, 9, 8, 7. The ranking of the cards is different from most other games: the 10 is ranked higher than the King. In fact, some games like Doppelkopf use two stripped decks. I later learned that this was called a "stripped deck", and wasn't terribly uncommon, especially in older games. The deck I bought was "incomplete", in the sense that it only used the cards A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7 in every suit, rather than the full deck of 52. The more I looked into the game, the more puzzling and different it became. Nobody I talked to had ever heard of the game, except my stepfather who mentioned the game by name, but knew nothing else of it. Knowing nothing else about the game, and unable to read German to any reasonable degree, I decided to pick up this pack of cards to take home and study. I first discovered the game when I was shopping in some of the German border shops near Denmark, and saw a deck of Skat cards for sale for relatively cheap in the toy and games section of the store. Skat is a really weird one in a lot of different ways, from its rather arcane rules, to its rather limited following.
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