Herz zu Herz


Herz zu Herz is a simple game of patience, that is played with a French-suited Skat pack of 32 cards. The aim of the game is to get rid of all the Hearts from the pack. It is basically a German adaptation of an earlier game called Knockout with slightly different rules, but played mostly the same way.

Rules

Like most games of patience, Herz zu Herz is a card game for one person. It uses a basic Skat deck of 32 cards.
At the start of the game, the pack is shuffled and placed as a stock face down on the table. Next, the top three cards are drawn and placed in a row, face up. Any cards of the suit of Hearts are laid off to form a separate stack and this process is repeated four times with three cards each time. After that the rest of the cards in the talon are shuffled with the upcards and three cards are drawn again and the Hearts laid off. This is repeated five times. If this round does not result in all the Hearts being laid off to the Hearts pile, there is a third round of shuffling, drawing 3 cards and laying off any Heart.
The patience is solved if, after this third round, all the Hearts are in their own pile, otherwise, the game is lost.

Knockout

The patience game Knockout is played mostly the same way as Herz zu Herz and possibly even the parent game. The difference is that the target suit is clubs instead of hearts and when a space is created in the row, it is filled. Thus, possibly more than 15 cards are dealt per round. There is also an expanded version called Abandon Hope where all 52 French-suited playing cards are used and 24 are dealt in each of the three rounds.

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