Bolachen

Bolachen is a three-player plain-trick card game from the Rupertiwinkel area of southern Upper Bavaria and the neighboring Austrian state of Salzburg. It is played with a 32-card German-suited deck in the Bavarian pattern and is generally considered the Bavarian cousin of the more elaborate Austrian game Preference. Bidding sets the contract for each hand, and players choose among three distinct types of play: Brand, an ordinary trump-suit contract; Bettel, in which the declarer tries to avoid taking any tricks at all; and Mord, the most demanding contract, in which the declarer must win every trick in the hand. Like the related game Wallachen, Bolachen has become rare in modern times and is treated by regional card game researchers as a game under threat of extinction, still played mostly for small stakes among older players in its home region. Its name may echo older references to Polish gaming traditions, though the exact origin of the word is not firmly established.