The Knorri card game, online, with friends or computers

What Knorri is, and where it comes from

On Pagat, John McLeod's rules site, Knorri sits with the beating games, where you get rid of your cards by beating the card played before yours. It is old, Finnish and for three or more players. The odd part comes first. Nobody is dealt a card. Nine lie face up on the table, and you are building your own hand out of them, one turned card at a time, before the second phase starts.

The history is thin, and all of this is Pagat's account. The Swedish Academy's encyclopedia of 1936 has an entry on Knorri citing mostly Finnish sources back to 1862. The main source for the rules is Korttipelikirja, a card-game book edited by Ilmo Kurki-Suonio and published by Otava in 1962. The name looks Swedish, yet no Swedish rules are known. Knorr means the suit of clubs, per that encyclopedia, and knorri is also a drink of coffee mixed with alcohol.

The loser is the hörri, which is also the game's other name in Western Finland and may be a dialect word for fool. McLeod calls a link between knorri and narri, fool, conceivable, which would tie it to the Russian Durak or the Swedish Stortok. We call it a guess. And if you came looking for Knarr, the Viking board game, that is another game entirely.

If you know Durak, the difference is in Pagat's own grouping. It files the Russian Durak games under attacks that fall on one defender, with several cards at once or with others throwing more in. Knorri is a round game, where the card that beats becomes the attack on the next player. We do not deal Durak.

Diamonds trump, and clubs are hard

Every play is a beat or a pick-up, so the ranking is the game. Ace is high and two is low. A spade or a heart is beaten by a higher card of its own suit, or by any diamond at all, whatever its rank. A diamond is beaten only by a higher diamond. A club is hard: only a higher club beats it, and a diamond never does. Nothing has to follow suit.

Take a few cases. With the nine of hearts on top, the ten of hearts beats it, so does the two of diamonds, and the king of spades does not. With the nine of diamonds on top only a higher diamond will do. With the nine of clubs on top only a higher club will, so even the ace of diamonds is no use. That makes the first trick all clubs: the holder of the two of clubs opens with it, and nothing but higher clubs can follow.

Build a hand, then get rid of it

On your turn the table turns the top card of the stock face up. If a smaller card of the same suit is on the table, you must take it into your pile along with the turned card, and you pick which when there are several. If not, and the turned card is a diamond, it takes a spade or a heart of your choice. If neither, the card stays on the table for whoever is next. When the stock runs out, the last player who took anything also takes what is left on the table. That pile is your hand. A player who took nothing is out and cannot lose.

Then everyone plays cards out in tricks that are not the trick-taking kind. On your turn you play one card that beats the top card, or you pick up the bottom card of the trick, the oldest one, into your hand. Here is one trick at three seats, so it needs three plays. A leads the 9 of hearts and B beats it with the 10 of hearts. C has no higher heart and no diamond, so C picks up the bottom card, the 9. A plays the 2 of diamonds, since any diamond beats a heart, and B tops that with the 6 of diamonds. Three cards are down, the trick is complete, and B, who played the last one, leads a new trick. C is left holding a 9 of hearts nobody asked for.

Play your last card and you are safe. The hand ends when one player is left holding cards: the hörri, who deals next. A hand that will not end has a rule of its own, below. There is no PDF of the rules; the how-to page has them in order, with Pagat's two worked tricks and a hand played out.

The rule set we follow, and where we chose

We follow one page, Pagat's, the only detailed account we found. It draws on Korttipelikirja and on notes from Cristian Seres, Olli Salmi and Mikko Saari. The Finnish Wikipedia stub agrees on the skeleton, diamonds trump and clubs hard, but cites nothing, and we found nothing independent that confirms the fine points. So where Pagat is silent we chose, and we say so here rather than pass our choice off as tradition.

Pagat allows three to eight seats and Finnish Wikipedia says two to six; we seat three to six. Pagat says points are usually not kept. Here they always are, on Pagat's scheme: going out scores a point for every other player still holding cards, and the loser scores minus everyone else's total, so the scores add up to zero. At four seats, in order out, that is plus three, plus two, plus one, minus six. Your host picks one, three or five hands, the highest total wins, and a tie for the top is shared.

The other choices are ours. The table turns the cards and makes the capture you are owed, and asks only when you have a choice, where Pagat has each player turn a card and lets anyone point out a miss. If nobody took a card in the whole first phase, the hand is dealt again. And we leave out soft clubs, where a spade, heart or diamond also beats a club, the last-card call, the older first phase Pagat credits to Seres, and more than six seats.

Pagat says nothing about a hand that will not end, and with three or more seats it can happen: the same cards go round and the same position comes back. People vary. Computers do not. So a hand also ends when a position comes round again, or after 1,500 plays and pick-ups. The players still holding cards are then ranked by cards held, fewest first, ties by turn order, which is our call, and scored as if they had gone out in that order. Points already earned stand, and the board says why the hand ended.

At the table: three to six of you, or two to five computers

Make a table, pick three to six seats and how many hands, and send each seat its link. The host can start it once three have sat down. The server shuffles, your hand is yours, and every other hand shows as a number. Pagat notes that the second phase is in theory a game of complete information, since every card was seen going into a pile. So the table keeps a log of every capture, play and pick-up, shows you the newest lines of it, and a careful player can track who holds what. Hiding the hands is a courtesy, not a secret: the log makes every hand deducible, which is Pagat's point, and the computers work from that log and the table, never from a hidden hand.

The board says whose turn it is, what just happened, each seat's cards, over several hands its running total, and how many plays the trick has against how many it needs. Press a dimmed card and it says which rule stops it. Once you are out of a hand you watch the others play it out, and there is no forfeit button. With hands still to come the table waits for a seat that has left, so stay for the next one; in the last hand the others can finish without you.

The computer table seats you against two to five computers, and your choice is remembered on this device. A computer reads only its own hand and the same log you see, never yours, and it is not random: the same position gets the same move. In the first phase it takes the highest card the rules allow. In the second it goes out when it can, plays the last two seats out exactly where it can search the position, and otherwise beats and leads with the card that is least use for beating what the others hold, spending a diamond on a spade or heart last. It steers away from moves that would bring the same position round again.

Is it hard, and what does it cost?

Not the hardest card game of all time. The hard part is memory, since the second phase rewards tracking what everyone took, and in our opinion that is the pull of it: every player gets the same log and decides how much to use it. Odds are nobody you invite has played it, which is the even footing we like.

It is free, with the occasional discreet ad. No account and no app to download: open a page, and to invite someone, drop them a link. A table you make waits 15 minutes for the first person to sit down and, once someone has, stays open until 48 hours after the last move; the resume list on this page finds it again. Nothing about a game against the computers is kept once the page is closed.