How to Play Durak

The Deck

Durak uses a 36-card deck: the ranks 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace in four suits (the 2s through 5s are removed). The Ace is high, and within a suit the order is 6 (low) up to Ace (high). One suit is the trump suit for the whole game — any trump card outranks every card of the other three suits.

Setup

• Each player is dealt 6 cards.
• The next card is turned face-up — its suit becomes the trump suit for the entire game.
• That trump card is slipped under the face-down stock, so it is the very last card drawn from the deck.
• The player holding the lowest trump attacks first.

The Bout: Attack and Defence

Play happens in bouts. One player is the attacker, the other the defender.

1. Attack: the attacker plays a card face-up. The defender must beat it (or take — see below).
2. Beating: a card beats the attack if it is either:
   • the same suit and a higher rank, or
   • any trump, when the attack is a non-trump.
   A non-trump can never beat a trump, and a trump can only be beaten by a higher trump.
3. Throw-ins: once an attack has been beaten, the attacker may add more attacking cards — but only of a rank that already appears on the table (among the attack or defence cards down). The defender must beat each new card.
4. Caps: the total number of attacking cards in a bout can never exceed six, and never more than the defender's hand size at the start of the bout.

Taking vs. Beating

A bout ends in one of two ways:

• The defender takes: if the defender cannot — or chooses not to — beat the attacks, they press Take and pick up all the cards on the table (attacks and defences alike) into their hand.
• Successful defence: if every attack is beaten and the attacker has finished (pressing Done / Бита), all the table cards are discarded face-down to the bita (the discard pile) and are out of the game for good.

Drawing Back Up

After each bout, both players refill their hands to six cards from the stock — the attacker draws first, then the defender. Once the stock (including that last trump card) is empty, no one draws any more, and the endgame begins.

Changing Roles

• If the defence held (the cards went to the bita), the defender becomes the new attacker.
• If the defender took the cards, the same attacker attacks again — the taker has to defend once more.

Winning — and the Fool

Once the deck is empty, a player who plays away their last card is safe and out of the round. The last player still holding cards is the durak — the loser. There is no scoring and no prize: the durak simply wears the title until the next game. If both players empty their hands on the same bout, the game is a draw.

Strategy Tips

Cultural Context

Durak is, by tradition, an old Russian folk game with no recorded inventor or date — learned at kitchen tables and passed down rather than published. It is, by common account, the most widely played card game in Russia and across much of the former Soviet Union, as much a social ritual as a contest.

The version here is the standard podkidnoy (throw-in) durak. A popular variant, perevodnoy (transfer) durak, lets the defender bounce an attack onto the next player by adding a card of the same rank; it is not included in this two-player game. Either way, the loser carries only the gentle, sociable shame of being the durak.