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German Whist
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About the game
German Whist is the classic way for two people to play whist, a trick-taking card game with a long history in Britain. You and the computer get thirteen cards each. The rest form a stock, with its top card turned face up, and the suit of the first face-up card is trumps for the whole hand.
The hand has two halves. In the first, each trick is played for the card on top of the stock: whoever wins the trick takes that face-up card, the loser takes the hidden one beneath it, and a new card is turned up. These tricks don't count. They are a way of swapping weak cards for strong ones, and of learning what your opponent holds. When the stock runs out the second half begins, and now every trick counts: whoever wins more of the last thirteen wins the hand.
The rules are the usual ones. You must follow the suit that was led if you can; otherwise you may play any card, and a trump beats any card of another suit. Your opponent is a cartoon dealer who explains what is happening in speech bubbles as you go.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now and press Z to start a hand.
F2 saves the full state of the emulator and F4 brings it back, so you can stop in the middle of a hand. A gamepad works too. The game's messages are in English.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Left / Right | D-pad | choose a card; choose on the game-over screen |
| Z | A | play the card, move the game on |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Look at the face-up card. In the first half, only bid for tricks when the card on offer is worth having; losing a trick on purpose still gets you a card.
Count the trumps. All 52 cards end up in play, so by the second half you can work out much of what the dealer holds from the cards that have gone by.
Keep a long suit. Late in the hand, a run of cards in one suit can win trick after trick once the trumps are gone.
Credits and licence
German Whist was made in 2019 by Press Play On Tape, with code by Filmote and graphics by Vampirics, and released under the BSD 3-clause licence. A few of its framework files are by Pharap under the Apache 2.0 licence. It uses the Arduboy2 library (BSD) by Scott Allen. The version here is built by us from the authors' source code, which is linked from this page with the licence texts.