Sticheln Card Game First Impressions

Sticheln is trick-taking for colours…

…with a weird system.

In the trick-taking card game Sticheln, players seek to gather points by taking certain suits, while avoiding the negative points in other suits.

At the beginning of each hand, each player selects one card from his hand, which becomes his “pain” suit. The face value of all the cards from that suit he takes will be negative points. Positive points are won by taking any other card not in your “pain” suit; each of these cards, however, is worth only a single point.

Players need not follow suit if they don’t wish to, but every card not in the suit led (except for the precious zeros) is considered a trump card, with the highest, earliest-played trump card taking the trick.

So based on these rules I picked the Pain suit of Red. I had a Red 1 so I started the game on -1 points. The goal was to win as many other cards as possible without winning red cards in tricks.

But the way tricks work is… odd… Or unique depending on how you look at it.

Everyone plays one card to the trick and you don’t have to follow suit, you can play whatever.

It’s basically the highest card that will win the trick as normal. But on a tie, the earliest card played in a round wins except if any card played is not in the lead suit… That makes it a trump card, Got it?

No me neither.

But, the winner of the trick takes all of the cards. Any cards they have at the end of the game in their pain suit are worth -1 point. Any other card is worth 1 point.

It’s a nice card game I’d like to play again now I know what I’m doing 🙂

Sticheln Update 03/06/2018

I don’t remember this game very much. But, by the sounds of it, it’s one of those unique, simple card games I used to like. They’re easy to teach, quick to play yet have a decent strategy.

The similarly named Stichling was one of them. That was a strategic trick-taking game where you were trying to not win too many tricks.

I think, after this and a couple of others, I stopped getting suckered in. I just never played them more than once or twice so I stopped buying them. There are still quite a few small card games I like and replay, just not as many.

I’ll find the perfect trick-taking game for me one day!

Jesta ThaRogue