How to play Lansquenet
The rules of Lansquenet, and a game played out one move at a time.
Lansquenet is a banking game played with one banker’s card, one players’ card and two things to decide: how many chips to put up, and whether to keep a bank you win. Read the rules below, or press play and we deal a three-seat match on the real table, stopping at each move to say what happened and why.
Press play and we deal a short game of Lansquenet on the real table. It stops on every move and says what just happened and what you could do next.
The pack and the chips
One standard 52-card deck, no jokers, shuffled fresh for every deal. Only rank matters. The suit of a card never counts, and there is no order of rank, only whether two cards are the same rank or not. Nobody holds a hand: every card is turned face up. Pagat needs at least two players and sets no upper limit. Here it is three to six seats, each for itself, and every seat starts a match on 100 chips. They are play chips: nothing is bought, won or kept. The aim is to hold the most chips when the match ends.
Posting the bank
One seat is the banker, drawn by lot for the first deal. In Pagat’s rules the banker is also the dealer; here the table shuffles and turns the cards, so nobody deals by hand. The banker posts a bank in fives, from five chips up to fifty, and never more than they hold. That is the most the other seats can stake against it together, so the banker can always pay.
The bank then goes round the table in seat order. One spell as banker is a turn, and it lasts until the bank is lost, passed on, or nobody stakes.
Staking
A stake goes on the players’ card: it wins if that rank turns up first, and loses if the banker’s rank does, or if the first two cards match. The other seats stake one at a time, starting with the one after the banker. When it is your turn you may pass, stake at least five chips, or fewer only when the bank or your chips run short, and up to what is still open in the bank, or cover the whole bank. Covering means your stake becomes exactly the bank. Every stake made so far goes back to its owner, your own earlier one included, and the staking ends with only your covering stake in play.
Staking goes round the table in rounds, one go for each seat, and a seat that passed can stake in a later round. It ends when the stakes add up to the bank, when somebody covers, or when a whole round passes with no new stake. Say the bank is 20 and one seat has staked 5. A second seat can stake up to 15 more, or cover with 20, which sends the 5 back.
If nobody stakes, the deal is void. No card turns, and the bank moves to the next seat.
The two cards, and the turn
The top card is the banker’s card, and it goes on the left. The next is the players’ card, on the right. If they are the same rank, the bank wins every stake at once and no more cards turn. That happens 3 times in 51, because 3 of the 51 cards left share the banker’s rank.
Otherwise cards turn one at a time until a matching card shows, one that matches the rank of either card. If it matches the banker’s card, the bank wins all the stakes. If it matches the players’ card, the banker pays each staker an amount equal to that stake, even money, and the stake itself comes back. The table turns the cards for you, one at a time, and rings the card that decides the deal with the word Pair beside it.
A worked deal. Bank 20, and two seats stake 10 each. The banker’s card is a queen, the players’ card a seven. A three, a king, then a seven: the players’ rank came first, so the banker pays 10 to each staker and loses 20.
Keeping the bank, or passing it
Lose the bank and it passes to the next seat, who sets a new one. Win it and you choose: keep it, or pass it on to the next seat. Keeping has two cases.
The banker’s card matched first: the winnings must go into the bank. Bank 20, stakes of 10 and 10, so the banker wins 20 and the next bank is 40. The first two cards were equal: you choose, the winnings in the bank or left out. Either way the bank never grows past what the banker holds.
How a match ends
A lap is one turn with the bank for each seat, and the host chooses one to four laps, two by default. A seat with fewer than five chips cannot hold the bank, so its turn is skipped and still counted, though it can go on staking.
The match ends when the last turn does, or at once when only one seat has any chips. The winning seat is the one with the most chips. A tie for most is a shared win. The bank has a small, exact edge, 3 in 51 of the chips staked, which is why everybody takes it in turn.
Where these rules come from
We follow John McLeod’s Pagat page on Lansquenet, Skin and Zecchinetta, which files them with the banking games and describes the 19th century French version. The name is from the German Landsknecht, a medieval mercenary, says Pagat. There is no Lansquenet rules PDF to download: these rules are the whole set, and the staged match is on the page. Where Pagat leaves a gap, or another source differs, we chose: one pack shuffled fresh each deal where Pagat’s traditional game shuffles about six together, equal first cards giving the bank every stake where Wikipedia gives it half, and no buying or selling of the bank, which Pagat allows.