Romanian card games.

01♠

A word before anything else

The history of popular card games is poorly documented almost everywhere in the world. They’re passed on by playing, not by writing, and by the time they reach a book they already carry a hundred years of variants.

What follows mixes fairly solid things, such as a game’s kinship with a family of European games, with things about which several stories circulate. We’ve marked which is which. Where nothing is known, we say so.

02♥

Macao

Macao belongs to the “shedding” family: games where you get rid of your cards by playing on top of the previous one, matching suit or rank. It’s the same family as Crazy Eights, Mau-Mau in German-speaking countries and, further along, the commercial game UNO.

The kinship with Mau-Mau is widely accepted and shows in the mechanics. How the name “Macao” got attached to it in Romania isn’t known; it has no clear link to the city.

What’s certain is that it became the most played card game in Romania and that it has more regional variants than any other game here: the cutting 7, the king that reverses direction, playing for points instead of places. Practically every group of friends has its own version.

03♦

Seven Cut

Seven Cut is related to the Russian Durak family and to Central European variants, and several stories circulate about its origin: Hungarian, Polish, Russian. None is established.

What’s characteristic of the Romanian variant is the way the cut EXTENDS the trick instead of ending it. That turns a trick from a simple pass around the table into a small battle that can last four or five rounds, and it’s what gives the game its decisions.

It also has the leanest scoring of any game played in Romania: eight points in the whole deck, four tens and four aces. You can take three tricks out of twenty and win, if those three were the ones with the points.

04♣

Sweep

Sweep is the Romanian version of a family of add-up capture games spread across the whole Mediterranean basin and the Balkans: Cassino in English, Scopa in Italy, Pishti in Turkey and Greece.

Its Romanian name almost certainly shares a root with the Turkish word that gave us “pishti”. And the Romanian word for a sweep, the capture that clears the table, has related words in other languages that mean exactly the same thing.

It’s the only one of the five that asks for arithmetic, and that’s probably why it was for a long time the game families used to teach counting.

05♠

Liar Liar

Liar Liar is the Romanian version of a game played everywhere under dozens of names: Cheat in English, Bullshit in America, Mentiroso in Spanish. The mechanic is universal: you lay cards face down, declare what they are, and someone can challenge you.

Its Romanian name, though, is local, and the finest of the five. It comes from a slang verb meaning to exaggerate, to embroider, to lie convincingly, as in the Romanian for “don’t try to fool me”. It’s a word that describes exactly what happens in the game, which is rare.

One detail sets the variant played here apart from many others: only the very next player can accuse. In versions where anyone can accuse, the game turns into a race of reflexes; here it stays a game of reading one person.

06♥

War

War is the simplest card game in the world and, probably for the same reason, the oldest and most widespread. It’s played in essentially the same way in dozens of countries, under dozens of names.

It has no decisions, no interesting variants and no history to tell. But for a great many Romanians it’s the first card game they ever played, usually with a grandparent at a kitchen table, at an age when you didn’t yet know the king beats the queen.

That’s exactly why it belongs here. It’s the game where everything begins.

07♦

Why they’re played differently from one place to another

Because nobody wrote them down. A game you learn from someone changes a little with each handing-down, and after three generations you have two variants that recognize each other but can’t be played at the same table.

The most common argument in Romania on this subject is the cutting 7 in Macao: for half the country a 7 cancels a penalty, for the other half it’s a card like any other.

The tables here play a single variant, written out on each game’s page, and each page also says which other variants are around. Not because it’s the correct variant (there’s no such thing), but so everyone at the table plays by the same rules.