Drużbart


Drużbart or Druzbart is an extinct Polish card game of the Bruus family. The game is descended from the oldest known card game in Europe, Karnöffel, a fact testified by its unusual card ranking and lack of a uniform trump suit.
Drużbart is designed for four players and is played with 36 cards of a German pack, each of the four suits comprising the cards 7–10, Unter, Ober, King, and Ace.

Background

Drużbart is one of a family of games descended from Karnöffel, the oldest European card game with a continuous tradition of play to the present day. These games are characterised by "the wildly disturbed ranking order in the chosen suit and particularly by the special role of the chosen Seven." It is one of the Bruus family of games whose progenitor was the German game of Brusbart. Other members of the family include Russian Bruzbart or Dulya, Livonian Brusbart, Swedish Bräus, Danish and Estonian Brus, and Greenlandic Voormsi. More distant cousins include Faroese Stýrivolt and Schleswig Knüffeln.
The game was widespread in Poland during the 18th century, one account describing how ladies in an upper-class house played it as an after-dinner game along with Zwicken. In the 19th century it is recorded as being played "by the lower classes or children" and in 1840 as being "in vogue among the common people." However, there are only two imperfect descriptions of its mode of play, dating to 1831 and 1888.
Druzbart was the favourite game of Count Henryk Rzewuski, the Polish journalist, novelist, and poet who was a past master of the Polish gawęda, a form of discursive fiction in which the narrator recounts incidents in a highly stylized personal language. Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet and scholar, was also a player and enjoyed Drużbart during his stay in St. Petersburg in 1828.
Druzbart appears to be extinct, although it was included in a 2012 reprint of the 1930 card game compendium by Gracz.

Cards

A German-suited, Polish-pattern pack was used comprising 32 or 36 cards. In the 1831 account the beaters rank as follows, from highest to lowest:
Cards of the same value ranked among one another in the suit order shown above: Acorns, Leaves, Hearts, Bells. The three highest cards are called matadors, and their names appear to derive from the German words Tolle, Brusbart, and Starka. Sevens were unbeatable when led, and the remaining cards—the Eights, Kings, and Tens—were duds, only fit for discarding.

Rules

The following outline of the rules is based on Gołębiowski and Gracz.
A 32- or 36-card, German-suited, Polish pattern pack was used.
The aim is to win the most tricks. Four players form two teams of two with partners sitting opposite one another and sharing a common trick pile. There are no trumps and, at each card rank, suits have the following order of precedence: Acorns, Leaves, Hearts, and Bells. The dealer deals 9 cards to each player, presumably clockwise and in packets of three, but the sources are silent on the exact procedure.
Forehand leads with any card. Players need not follow suit, but must head the trick. Sevens are unbeatable if led, but otherwise cannot beat any other card. Eights, Tens, and Kings are of no value, with the exception of those that are matadors.
The player who has played the highest card wins the trick and leads to the next. If four duds are played, the player who led the first dud wins the trick and leads to the next. Play ends once one of the two teams has taken five tricks.

Scoring

Players chalk a number of lines on a slate. A line is erased for each point scored. Winning the deal scores 1 point, and there is a bonus point for winning the first five tricks. There are penalties for losing a matador, especially to your partner.
The first team to erase all its lines scores as many game points as their opponents have lines left i.e. if team A erase all their lines and team B have 3 left, team A scores 3 game points. Gracz goes on to describe a rather complex and less-than-clear system of cartoonish symbols that are chalked to denote various penalties incurred.

Clock Druzbart

Gołębiowski describes a three-hand game known as Clock Druzbart. Here, players play for themselves and lines are chalked up in the form of a tripod with one line erased for each trick taken. Otherwise the rules are the same as in the four-player game.

Footnotes

Literature