Bauernheinrich

Bauernheinrich, meaning Farmer Henry in German, is a card game for four players traditionally played in the Angeln region of Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. It is played with a standard thirty two card Skat pack and belongs to the shedding and beating family of card games, in which the objective is to be the first player to discard every card from hand. Its most distinctive feature is that each of the four players holds their own personal trump suit rather than a single shared trump for the whole hand, so any player can trump another player's card during a trick, a mechanic the game shares with the Czech game Dudak and the Russian game Svoi Kozyri. Trump suit assignment is tied to whoever holds the ace of clubs, and players must follow suit or trump when able, taking the trick and its cards if they cannot. This regional four player structure makes Bauernheinrich a distinctive example of German folk card games built around individual rather than shared trump ownership.