Germany’s four-hand trick game, where nobody tells you who your partner is
Doppelkopf — “double head” — is a four-player trick-taking game played with a doubled pack of 48 cards, every card present twice. Its defining idea is that the partnerships are hidden: the two players holding a Queen of Clubs are partners and are not allowed to say so. Working out who is on your side, while keeping the other pair guessing about you, is most of the game. It is the great card game of northern Germany and the Rhine-Main region, descended from Schafkopf, and its tournament rules have been kept since 1982 by the Deutscher Doppelkopf-Verband.
There are 240 card points in the pack — they are called Augen — and each side is trying to capture more than half of them in tricks. The catch is that the two halves are not symmetrical: the Re party needs 121, while the Kontra party needs only 120. Kontra gets the easier bar because Re holds both Queens of Clubs, which are among the highest trumps in the game.
Doppelkopf uses a 48-card pack: ace, ten, king, queen, jack and nine in each of the four suits, with two copies of every card. Each player is dealt twelve.
| Card | Ace | Ten | King | Queen | Jack | Nine |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Augen | 11 | 10 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
Every suit therefore holds 60 Augen and the pack holds 240. Note that the ten is the second most valuable card, worth more than a king — which is part of why the ten of hearts being the top trump matters so much.
Doppelkopf does not have a trump suit. It has a trump list, and it cuts straight across the suits. In a normal game the trumps are, highest to lowest:
10♥ › Q♣ Q♠ Q♥ Q♦ › J♣ J♠ J♥ J♦ › A♦ 10♦ K♦ 9♦
That is 26 trump cards. Everything else — clubs, spades and hearts other than the ten — is a plain suit, called a Fehlfarbe, and ranks ace, ten, king, nine. Because all four queens, all four jacks and the whole of diamonds are trump, the plain suits are short: clubs and spades hold eight cards each and hearts only six.
The cards have names at any real table. The ten of hearts is the Dulle, the queen of clubs is die Alte (“the old woman”), the ace of diamonds is the Fuchs (fox) and the jack of clubs is Karlchen.
Deal the cards and look for a queen of clubs. If you have one, you are Re, together with whoever holds the other. If you have neither, you are Kontra. Nobody announces this, and deliberately signalling it outside the rules is not allowed — you are meant to work it out from the play.
Two special cases come straight from the deal:
The player to the dealer’s left leads the first trick; after that the winner of each trick leads the next.
Either side may raise the stakes by announcing, and the deadlines are counted in cards still in your hand, not in tricks played. You must speak while you still hold at least:
| Announcement | Cards still in hand |
|---|---|
| Re or Kontra | 11 |
| keine 90 | 10 |
| keine 60 | 9 |
| keine 30 | 8 |
| schwarz | 7 |
Re and Kontra simply say “my side will win” and are worth two points each. The rest are Absagen: saying keine 90 claims the opponents will not even reach 90 Augen, and it raises your own requirement to 151. Each further step is worth one more point — and if you miss it you lose everything the announcements were worth, which is why experienced players treat an Absage as needing roughly nine times out of ten certainty rather than a bare majority.
A level whose deadline has passed can never be caught up later, but you may skip levels while still in time — and every level you skipped still scores.
Before play, any player may declare a solo and take on the other three alone. A solo pays triple to the soloist and single to each opponent. There are five kinds:
A solo in diamonds is worth knowing about: it ranks card for card exactly like a normal game, so the only thing it changes is that you are playing alone.
The winning side scores one point for taking the hand, plus one more for each threshold the losers fell under (90, 60, 30, and no trick at all). Every announcement made by either side is then added to the same pot — and the winner takes all of it. That is why a hand carrying Re, Kontra and a couple of Absagen can swing eight or nine points.
Four bonus points, the Sonderpunkte, are available in a normal game and never in a solo:
Points are paid plus and minus, so the four players’ scores always add up to zero.
Four. Doppelkopf is a four-handed game and every hand is played by exactly four people. Clubs often seat five at a table and let the dealer sit out the hand they deal, but the game itself is always four-handed. This version plays four.
In a normal game there are 26 trumps, in this order from highest to lowest: the ten of hearts, then the queens of clubs, spades, hearts and diamonds, then the jacks in that same suit order, then the ace, ten, king and nine of diamonds. Everything else is a plain suit ranking ace, ten, king, nine. Note this leaves hearts with only three plain cards, because its ten is the highest trump in the game.
You do not, and that is the point. The two players holding a queen of clubs are the Re party and the other two are Kontra, but nobody says so. You work it out from how people play: who discards valuable cards onto whose tricks, who announces and when, and who eventually has to put a queen of clubs on the table.
The Dulle is the ten of hearts, the highest trump in a normal game. There are two of them in the pack, and when they meet in the same trick the one played FIRST wins, not the second. Some casual house rules reverse that, but the tournament rules are explicit that the earlier card is the higher one.
It is an announcement claiming the opposing side will not reach 90 card points. It is worth an extra point if it comes off, but it also raises your own requirement from 121 points to 151, and losing it costs you the hand plus everything the announcements were worth. The swing between winning a plain Re and losing a keine 90 is eight points, so it is not a bet to make on a hunch.
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser with no account, no download and no payment, against three computer opponents, and there is an online mode for playing with friends.