Elfern

Elfern, also called Elfmandeln, is an old German and Austrian two-player card game described as easy and enjoyable to play. It is a trick-and-draw game with no trumps, played with a 32-card pack, either the French-suited Piquet pack or the German-suited Skat pack, with each player dealt a hand of six cards. The object is to win a majority of the twenty honours, namely the ace, king, queen, jack and ten of each suit, or the ober and unter in a German-suited deck, and a player needs eleven or more points to win a single deal. Elfern is at least two hundred fifty years old, with documented references appearing as early as 1759 in a letter by the poet Christian Furchtegott Gellert. Its name derives from the German for playing elevens, referring to the winning score requirement, and the game remains popular among German children today and is considered a possible ancestor of the Marriage family of card games.