Ziegen Kriegen

Ziegen Kriegan (Goat War in German!) is a trick-taking card game that is very simple to learn and play.

Just as with a card game such as Whist, on their turn players play a card from their hand, and the highest card wins the trick. The deck of cards is numbered from 1-50, and players play until their hands are empty. Each card displays a number of goat heads, and it’s these heads rather than the tricks themselves that are counted up at the end of the game.

But: there is also a second deck of cards that are revealed, one by one, over the first four rounds. These cards show elements of a landscape, and are joined together to make up ‘Goat Hill’ and they are also numbered – from 1-8. The four numbers that come together on the Hill are added up to show the maximum amount of goat heads that a player can win in the game without going ‘bust’. For instance, if the combined numbers on Goat Hill add up to 12 and a player has 13 or more at the end of the game, they are bust and don’t score anything. And as the player who played the lowest card in the first four rounds gets to place the next card in Goat Hill, they can put pressure (or even bust) a player who has already won several goat heads.

It’s a game that can be learned quickly and combines luck with strategy – simply going all out for as many goat heads as you can will inevitably backfire, so you need to stay on your toes.