Königrufen

Königrufen, also spelled Königsrufen (German for Calling the King), is a four-player trick-taking card game belonging to the tarot family, played chiefly in Austria and the South Tyrol region of northern Italy. It uses a 54-card Tarock deck in the Industrie und Glück design and is played with variants for two, three or six players when four are not available. The game is widely described as the only variant of Tarock played across most of Austria, and by 2015 had become the country's favourite card game. Its 22 trump cards give it a reputation for demanding intelligence and serving as a kind of mental training for players. The four-handed variant is first documented in a book from 1827, though the game is believed to have been played for several decades before that record. Königrufen belongs to a wider family of related Tarock games, including Tapp Tarock, Neunzehnerrufen, Zwanzigerrufen and Hungarian Tarock.