Ulti, the Hungarian card game, with friends or the computer

Ulti, and not the trading card

Ulti, or Ultimó, is Hungary's national trick-taking game for three. Pagat, the rules page we follow, calls it the most popular card game in Hungary and almost unknown outside it. The name is a bid. Say ulti and you promise to win the last trick with the lowest trump, the 7, which is harder than it sounds: the follow-suit rules can force the 7 out early, and if trumps are led and it is your only one, out it goes. The game is related to the Czech Mariáš, and the whole family goes back to the old French game Mariage.

The version we deal is Rablóulti, robber ulti, named for the way each bidder robs the talon. Gyula Zsigri's history on the same Pagat site says it was first described in 1948, in a booklet whose author claimed it had become popular in 1945.

A search for ulti card game also shows a trading card called Ulti from the One Piece game. This is not that. Nothing here is collected or bought: it is the full 32-card pack, seven up to ace, and three seats.

The Hungarian pack, and the faces you get here

The pack Ulti is played with in Hungary is the Tell pattern. Its aces show the seasons of the year, its kings are crowned and ride horses, and its overs and unders carry characters from the William Tell legend. Pagat's guess for why a Swiss legend sits on Hungarian cards is that, when the design became popular in the nineteenth century, the Tell story was read as a symbol of resistance against Austrian domination.

One Budapest explainer credits the card painter József Schneider with the first Hungarian deck, sometime in the 1830s, and says 29 December is Hungarian Cards Day, for the day a plaque went up on his former house. None of that art is here. We deal the ordinary card faces, with acorns as clubs, leaves as spades, bells as diamonds and hearts as hearts, and the overs and unders as queens and jacks.

Rob the talon or pass it on

The seat after the dealer, the opener, has to commit first, and starts with twelve cards to everyone else's ten. There is no talon yet. The opener throws two cards away, face down, and that is the talon, then names a contract. A deal can never be passed out. After that it is your choice each turn: pass, or take the talon, look at both cards, throw any two back down and name a strictly higher contract. You can also name a higher contract without touching the talon, which is legal and unusual. Look, and you have to bid.

Three passes in a row end the auction, and the last bidder is the declarer, alone against the other two. Pagat's wording, until all three seats choose not to look at the talon, leaves open what a bid made without looking counts as, so here it counts as a bid, not a pass. You may rob your own discards: when both others pass you can take the talon again and raise your own bid, at the price of giving them another turn with your new discards. Whoever takes the talon sees what the last bidder chose to lose, and bluffing with a bid you cannot make is allowed. Pagat adds that because the talon changes hands with every bid, a bidder can collect a very powerful hand over a few rounds, which is why careful bidders throw away cards that will not help the others. The talon shows as two backs, and only the seat that last put cards into it sees them. The board names that seat to everyone.

Thirty-eight bids, built from parts

Bidding is deciding how much to promise. The modest promise is the simple game: take more card points than the other two, with aces and tens ten each and the last trick ten, ninety in all. Add an ulti and you promise the last trick with the trump 7. Go bigger with 40-100, a hundred card points counting the trump king and queen as forty, or 20-100, which counts a pair in another suit as twenty instead. Then the extremes: betli, losing every trick with no trumps, and durchmars, winning all ten.

Put the parts together and you get thirty-eight bids on twenty rungs. Hearts are the double suit and the other three are minor suits, so hearts double the stakes. Bids rank by value, the simple game's value counting only to break a tie, and every bid has to beat the one before it. Some are level, so neither can overbid the other: a heart durchmars and a minor-suit 20-100 ulti are both worth twelve, and a minor-suit 40-100 ulti, a heart 40-100 and a minor-suit 20-100 are all worth eight. Promising a part you cannot make, ulti without the 7, is legal, and the part simply fails. Pagat calls the plain contract Pass, which is confusing when pass also means declining to bid. Here it is Simple game, and pass is only the decline.

A heart ulti, with the money

Bid heart ulti. Hearts double, so the simple game is worth 2 and the ulti 8, and if you win both, each of the other two pays you 10. Win the game but lose the ulti, because your 7 was forced out or beaten in the last trick, and you win 2, lose 8 and pay a further 8 for the failed ulti: 14 to each of them. Now suppose a defender calls kontra on the ulti with their card to the first trick. Win everything and it is 2 plus 16 from each. Win the game and lose the ulti and it is 22 to each, because the kontra doubles the 8 to 16 and the extra 8 for a lost ulti is never doubled. Those are the figures on Pagat's own page, and they are what the table pays. Every deal is settled the same way, the declarer taking twice the amount and each defender paying it, or the reverse, so the scores always add up to zero. At the count the board lists each result and each seat's payment.

Doubling, and the points nobody bid

If you are defending and think a part will fail, say kontra to it with your card to the first trick and that part is worth double. After the first trick the declarer may rekontra, and the two sides then take turns with szubkontra, hirskontra, mordkontra and fedáksári, which is times sixty-four. Each step doubles only what the last one doubled. You press a button for each part you may raise, so nobody has to remember the words.

Then the points nobody bid, in a minor suit and doubled in hearts. Win the last trick with the 7 without having bid ulti and you take 2 from each defender. Play it and lose and you pay 4 each. A 7 played last by a defender is paid the same way. Reach a hundred card points unbid and the simple game is worth double. Win all ten tricks unbid and that is 3.

Whose rules, and what is missing

We follow John McLeod's Pagat rules with Gyula Zsigri's corrections: self-robbing allowed, durchmars at six. Other sets differ. Wikipedia says each group tends to agree its own and adds a four aces bid, Pagat notes that the Siófok and Kecskemét tournaments score durchmars differently, and Csaba Biro's modified 4M standard puts it at seven. We picked one set and stuck to it, with one simplification: Pagat has each defender kontra alone in betli and in no-trump durchmars, and here a kontra binds both defenders in every contract.

Four aces and four tens, suit-bid ulti, the half-hand ulti, the four-player game, the ace of hearts ritual that ends a real session and foul penalties are all left out, and you cannot play an illegal card here, so no penalties are needed. Real Ulti has no end, so ours is a match. The host chooses 6, 9 or 12 deals, every seat opens and deals equally often, the highest total wins, and a tie for first plays on, one deal at a time. The score is points, not money.

What you get here, and where it stops

Two ways to play Ulti online. Against the computer you take a seat with two computers, pick 6, 9 or 12 deals and press Next deal when one is counted. With friends, the host opens a table and sends two links, one for each seat, named the host, guest 1 and guest 2. It takes three people, since there are no computer seats inside a room. There is chat while you play, and voice if whoever made the table switched it on. The host has 15 minutes to take a seat at a new table, and once anyone has sat down it stays open until 48 hours after the last move. If you have never played, start against the computers: nobody should learn the kontra chain in front of friends.

The board does the bookkeeping. The auction is logged line by line beside the standing bid and its stake. A card you may not play is dimmed, and pressing it says why in the status line. The bid builder shows the stake as you build, switches off a part that cannot go with the rest of the bid and says why, and sends only a bid that beats the standing one. The server shuffles and deals, and no other hand reaches your screen.

The computers play a plain game. At a table of three computers about 95 percent of deals are a simple game, because the opener has to bid and they seldom raise; bid Ulti or 40-100 yourself to see the rest. When they do raise, it is a simple game, ulti, 40-100 or betli, in hearts when hearts scores clearly better. A computer that takes the talon and finds nothing to raise with must bid something higher, and the cheapest step up from a simple game is the simple game in hearts, so it plays hearts then too. They never choose an open bid, a durchmars or a heart betli. As defenders they kontra only a part their own cards make fail, such as the trump 7 you need for your ulti. The computer that declares never rekontras. In an open bid the two defenders may not discuss their hands; the board says so and cannot stop them. A computer match is gone once you leave the page, and only the high contrast switch is remembered. It is free, with the odd ad now and then that we mean to keep discreet.