A few years ago, a friend and I flew down to Jeju Island in southern South Korea for a weekend away. We packed the essentials: some clothes, gear, and the rules for about a dozen different card games that could be played with a standard deck of cards. The weather was really bad that weekend, so we spent a lot of our time in our hotel room playing cards. I’ve since forgotten most of the games we played that weekend, but there are two games I remember well and still play from time to time: German Whist and Watten.

German Whist (it’s actually British origin; I have no idea how it got its name) is a simple two-player card game played with a standard deck of cards. To begin, the deck is shuffled and each player receives a hand of thirteen cards. Then reveal the top card from the talon and place it face up on top of the remaining cards; the revealed suit will be trump for the entire game. During the course of the game, players must follow suit.

The players now play a trick to win, or lose, the face up card. The winner of the trick (the player playing the highest trump or, if no trump is played, the highest card of the suit led) takes the face up card; the loser takes the facedown card underneath it, without revealing it to his or her opponent. Once both players take their cards into their hands, the next card in the deck is revealed and another trick is played. This continues until all of the remaining cards have been won and the players are left with a final hand of thirteen cards.

The second phase is a round of thirteen tricks, with the player winning seven of the tricks the winner of the game.

The meat of the game lies in the first phase, when the goal of each player is to improve his or her hand for the second phase of the game. Accumulating as many trump cards as possible is a good place to start, but players should also strive to get some decent off-suit cards as well as a void to free up his choices later in the game. It’s tough though, and sometimes frustrating, to see your ho-hum card played to a trick replaced with another ho-hum card, or even something worse. Ideally, the card you gain from the stock will be equal to or better than the card you played; but it’s impossible to be that lucky.

There’s not much to it, but it is a fun diversion if you need a quick two-player game to kill some time. Sure, it’s luck heavy, and quite frustrating if nothing breaks your way (I’ve been tempted to throw my cards out the window a number of times), but if that’s tolerable for you I can recommend it.

This is a great card game. I don't think there is too much luck, especially if you play that you count the points for tricks won in the first phase of the game.

Fans of German Whist may want to check out this original creation of mine, which was inspired by that game:

http://www.thegamesjournal.com/rules/WYSIWYG.shtml.