Zwicken

Zwicken is an old Austrian and German card game for four to six players, usually played for small stakes and well suited to a party. It belongs to the Rams group of trick-taking games, in which players may drop out of a deal if they think they cannot win a minimum number of tricks. It is played with 32 cards, from a William Tell pack, common in Austria, or a Piquet pack, and it has a permanent trump, the seven of diamonds, which ranks just below the trump ace. A distinctive hop and jump rule lets the deal pass to the next player or skip several players according to the card revealed on the cut. The game is first recorded in Salzburg in 1783 as a game of chance, was banned in several Habsburg lands by 1807, and kept being played and published through the nineteenth century. The name means to pinch.