The Ristikontra card game, online with friends or the computer

Players, objective and the rules we follow

Ristikontra is a Finnish trick-taking game, popular in lumber camps, for two partnerships, partners sitting opposite. No suit to follow, no trump, no card to beat: only the rank of a card matters. The object is to gather points, not tricks. One standard pack, six cards each, and a stock of twenty-eight face down in the middle.

This table follows the base game for four on John McLeod's rules page, because it sets that game out in full. He thinks it likely the original of the sedma group, games from Lapland to Hungary where the last card of the led rank wins the trick. The Finnish Wikipedia entry agrees with his page on the deal, the refill from the stock, the ban on a fourth lead and the card values. Where other sources differ, we say so below.

A turn: play and draw, or play in the dark

On your turn you must do one of two things. Play any card from your hand and take the top of the stock at once, which puts you back to six. Or play in the dark: flip the top card of the stock face up, and that card is your play, which the table labels as from the stock. No choice, no draw, and your hand stays as it was. A flipped card takes tricks like any other. The draw and the dark play are both possible only while the stock has cards remaining.

Each play uses one stock card, four to a trick, so the stock runs out exactly when trick seven ends. Tricks eight to thirteen are played from the hand alone: no drawing, no dark play. Thirteen tricks make a deal. Any card in your hand is a legal play, with one exception, covered below.

Who takes the trick, with a worked example

The seat after the dealer starts the first trick of a deal. A trick goes to whoever played the last card of the same rank as the card led, and if nobody matched it, the leader keeps it. The winner puts all four cards in their side's face-down pile and starts the next trick, and play carries on clockwise from them.

Say you lead a 7. The next seat throws an ace on it, gambling that the last seat, their partner, holds a 7. Your partner plays a 3, and the last seat a 9. Nobody matched your rank, so the trick is yours, ace and all: eleven points for a card worth nothing. Had the last seat held a 7, that later 7 would have taken it instead.

The exception is the lead ban. You may not start a fourth trick in a row with the same rank. If the last three tricks of the deal were all led with kings and you hold a king and a 9, the king is refused and you lead the 9. The board shows the barred rank, dims the card and tells you why.

Scoring: card values, game points and how a match ends

The card values: an ace is worth 11, a ten 10, a king 4, a queen 3, a jack 2, and every other card nothing. A deal holds 120 points. Only the points in your pile count, never the number of tricks you took. After trick thirteen each side adds its pile, and the table shows how many aces, tens, kings, queens and jacks each pile held.

Sixty-one or more wins the deal and one game point. All 120 wins two. At 60-60 nobody scores, and one game point is held for the next deal that has a winner, who takes it on top of their own. The first side to seven game points wins the match.

Variations: where the sources differ, and what we chose

McLeod describes Ristiklappi, a northern form with five cards each, in which a side that took a queen early must win a king trick late. The Finnish Wikipedia entry, which calls the game "Ristikontra or ristilappi", lists that queen and king rule as an optional extra. We do not deal it. The same entry’s plain paragraph on play also says the fourth king may not be played while the stock lasts. McLeod gives that only inside Ristiklappi, and we do not play it. McLeod also lists house scoring, a 60-point pack scored five down to one, and Kontra, a variant for two or three with rules of its own. Not here either.

The two sources part ways on a 60-60 split. For a clean game ending 60-60 the Finnish Wikipedia says count the cards or call it a draw. McLeod holds the game point for the next deal, and so do we.

His page is silent on a few small things, so we decided. The draw comes right after the card, before the next seat moves. A dark start is not offered while a rank is barred, because the flipped card could be that rank. A second 60-60 deal adds to the held point instead of replacing it. And the match is to seven with no option, where his page lets a table agree another target.

The piles are face down, so the board shows a count of cards and never what is in them, and it shows only the trick in progress and the last trick taken. Keeping track of what has gone is the skill, and in our opinion the fun.

Play it online: four seats, and the table against the computer

Ristikontra takes four players and only four, so there is no seat chooser and no three-handed version here. Open a table, take three invite links, one per empty seat, and send them. All four seats are claimed before the first deal, and the chat tags each seat as on side one or side two. The host and guest 2 are partners, and guests 1 and 3 are the other side. Chat is always there, and voice if the host switched it on. No computer ever takes a seat at a shared table. The server shuffles and deals, and it never sends you another seat's cards. If somebody forfeits by leaving the table, the match ends as a draw and nobody wins it.

Against the computer you sit at the bottom of the table with a computer partner across from you and two computer opponents, West on your left and East on your right. It is the same board and the same rules as a shared table, one computer move at a time, and Pause computers holds them while you think. Every face-up card carries its name for a screen reader, and the high contrast switch is remembered on your device.

Apart from that switch, nothing is kept at the computer table, so a closed tab is a finished match. There is surely an app somewhere, but here you open a page and start, no account and nothing to download. It is free, and you might see an ad now and then; we will try to keep them discreet.

Ristikontra is here because we are aiming, eventually, at every game you can play with a deck of cards. Probably nobody at your table has played it, which suits us: the best card game to play with friends is the one where you all know the rules, or none of you does. Only three of you? Pick one of the other card games here that seats three. This one will wait.

What the computer does

It counts. A computer sees its own hand, the trick, the barred rank and how many cards remain in the stock, and it remembers every card played face up, so it knows how many of each rank it has not seen. It never sees your hand or the order of the stock.

When it leads, it plays a point card if every other copy of that rank has been seen, because that trick is certain. Otherwise it leads a zero-point card from the rank with the fewest unseen. It leads any other point card only when it has no worthless card it may lead, because everything it holds scores or its only worthless cards are of the barred rank, and when everything it holds scores it flips the stock instead, if it may. Following, if its partner is winning and it is last to act, it piles its richest card onto the trick. Otherwise, with points on the table and a card of the led rank, it plays that card when it is last to act or an opponent is winning. Anything else, it throws away a zero-point card, single ranks first, or flips the stock when everything it holds scores.