The Lansquenet card game, online, with friends or the computer

The word, the soldiers and the card game

Lansquenet is the French spelling of Landsknecht, the German word for the mercenary foot soldiers of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the card game is named after them. The word is also the start of a village name in the novel Chocolat, and the protagonist of the video game Pentiment plays it. If you came for the soldiers, their clothes or the novel, this is the wrong page. This one deals the card game.

John McLeod’s Pagat rules site calls it extremely simple and one of the oldest recorded card games. Rabelais lists it in his book Gargantua, in the 1542 edition according to Pagat and in 1534 according to Wikipedia. It is a banking game. One seat is the bank, everybody else plays against it, and the bank moves round the table. We follow Pagat’s rules, and say so below where Wikipedia differs.

A deal: the bank, the stakes, the two cards

The banker posts a bank, in fives from five chips up to fifty, and never more than they hold. The other seats stake in turn, starting with the one after the banker. Each can pass, stake from five chips (fewer only when the bank or their chips run short) up to what is still open in the bank, or cover the whole bank, which sends every other stake back and ends the staking.

Then two cards turn, the banker’s card and the players’ card. If they are the same rank, the bank wins every stake at once. If not, cards keep turning until one matches the rank of the banker’s card or the players’ card, and that first matching card decides the deal. Match the banker’s card first and the bank takes the stakes. Match the players’ card first and the banker pays each staker an amount equal to that stake, on top of the stake coming back. Rank is all that counts. Suits never do.

Here is one dealt through. The banker posts 20 chips and the next two seats stake 10 each, which fills the bank. The queen of hearts is the banker’s card and the seven of spades the players’ card. A three turns, then a king, then a seven. The seven matches the players’ card first, so the banker pays each of the two stakers 10, loses 20 in all, and the bank passes to the next seat.

Keeping the bank, passing it, and how a match ends

Lose the bank and it moves to the next seat, which posts a new one. Win, and you choose: keep it or pass it on. If the banker’s card was matched first, keeping means the winnings must go into the bank, so a bank of 20 that took 20 in stakes becomes a new bank of 40. If the first two cards were equal, you may add the winnings or leave them out. A grown bank never exceeds what the banker holds.

Every seat starts a match on 100 chips. The host chooses one to four laps, two by default, and a lap is one turn with the bank for each seat. A turn lasts until the banker loses or passes. If nobody stakes, the deal is void: no card turns and the bank moves on. A seat with under five chips cannot hold the bank, so its turn is skipped, but it still counts. The match ends when the last turn does, or when only one seat has any chips. Most chips wins, and a tie for most is a shared win.

It is pure luck, and the bank has the edge

There is no skill in Lansquenet. Nothing you do changes the next card. Your only choices are how many chips to put up or stake, and whether to keep a bank you won. The bank also has the edge, and it comes from one place. After the banker’s card, three of the 51 cards left match it, so the first two cards are equal 3 times in 51, and then the bank wins outright. Otherwise each of the two ranks is equally likely to match first, so without the equal pairs it is a coin toss.

Add it up. With one deck the bank wins 27 deals in 51, or 52.9 percent, and its expected gain is 3 in 51, or 5.9 percent, of the chips staked. On a stake of 10 chips that is about six tenths of a chip, on average, in the bank’s favour. A test runs all 2,652 possible first pairs through the table’s own rules and gets the same figures. Pagat’s traditional six packs shuffled together would change them. Pagat’s advice for Zecchinetta is that everybody should have a turn as banker, and here every lap gives each seat one.

Why play, then? In our opinion for the run of cards. Two ranks are in play, one of them has to show, and you watch it turn up while you talk. In our opinion it is about as easy to learn as any card game, and it is neither the hardest card game of all time nor the hottest one right now.

Skin, Zecchinetta and the other banking games

Lansquenet belongs to the banking games, and it has cousins. Skin is the American one: a single pack, best for about six, where you pick which cards to back and can make side stakes with each other. Zecchinetta is the Italian equivalent, associated with Sicily, and its usual form gives the players two cards. Italian Americans call it Ziginette, and it is traditionally played with an Italian 40-card pack. All of that is Pagat’s account.

None of those is dealt here. The table deals the French game as Pagat describes it, with three rulings that differ from other sources. One 52-card pack, shuffled fresh for every deal, where Pagat’s traditional game shuffles about six together and Wikipedia has it played with an Italian 40-card pack. Equal first cards give the bank every stake, Pagat’s rule, where Wikipedia gives it half and calls that jumelle. And nobody buys or sells the bank, which Pagat allows up to three times: a banker who passes hands it on.

What the table does, and what it does not

Three to six seats at one table, the host’s choice, opening on four. Pagat needs at least two players and sets no upper limit; we stop at six, and start at three because two would be a duel with the bank. Each seat gets its own invite link, and nobody needs an account or a download. Or press Play the computer and sit against two or three computers. They have no skill to show, since the game has none. Each follows fixed bankroll rules: it puts up about 15 percent of its chips as the bank, stakes a slice of its chips, and covers a bank of 15 percent of its chips or less about one time in five. A room has no computers, so a room needs three people.

The cards turn themselves. There are no hands to hold and nobody deals one: Pagat’s dealer is the banker, but here the table shuffles a fresh deck for every deal and turns the cards. Nobody clicks to turn a card, because nothing about it is a decision. The board shows them one after another, the banker’s card on the left and the players’ card on the right, and rings the card that decides the deal, with the word Pair beside it, so colour is never the only sign. How many chips to put up is the only choice you make in a deal, and when nothing is on offer to you the board says why.

These are play chips. Nothing is bought, won or kept: every match starts each seat on 100, and no chip count is ever stored. A seat that runs out of chips watches the match to its end. It is free, and an ad may turn up now and then; we will try to keep it discreet. Somebody has surely built a Lansquenet app. Here you just start.