Durak

Durak ("fool") is played with a 36-card deck — ranks 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A in four suits (no 2–5). One suit is the trump, and the goal is simple: don't be the last player left holding cards. That player is the durak — the fool.

1. Setup: each player is dealt 6 cards. The next card is turned face-up — its suit is trump for the whole game — and slid under the stock, so it is the last card drawn. The player holding the lowest trump attacks first.
2. Attack: the attacker plays a card. The defender must beat it.
3. Beating: a card beats another if it is the same suit and higher, or if it is any trump (a non-trump can never beat a trump; a trump must be beaten by a higher trump).
4. Throw-ins: once a card is beaten, the attacker may add more attacks — but only of a rank already on the table. The defender must beat each. Attacks are capped at six, and never more than the defender's hand size at the start of the bout.
5. Taking vs. beating: if the defender can't (or won't) beat everything, they press Take and pick up all the cards on the table. If every attack is beaten, the attacker presses Done (Бита) and all those cards are discarded face-down to the bita.
6. Drawing: after each bout both players refill to 6 from the stock — the attacker draws first, then the defender. No one draws once the stock is empty.
7. Roles: if the defence held, the defender becomes the new attacker; if the defender took the cards, the same attacker attacks again.
8. Winning: once the deck is empty, a player who runs out of cards is safe. The last player still holding cards is the durak. (If both empty their hands on the same bout, it's a draw.)

Durak — the name means "fool" — is, by common account, the most popular card game in Russia and across much of the former Soviet Union. It is an old folk game with no recorded inventor or date, learned at kitchen tables and passed between generations rather than published. Unusually, there is no winner's prize: play simply continues until one player is left holding cards, and that player carries the gentle, sociable shame of being the durak.

The form shown here is the standard podkidnoy ("throw-in") durak, in which other players may pile extra cards of matching rank onto the defender. A common variant, perevodnoy ("transfer"), lets the defender bounce the attack onto the next player by adding a card of the same rank; it is not implemented in this version.

Much of Durak's character comes from its trump suit and its tension between attack and defence: when to spend a precious trump, when to take cards and rebuild, and how to read an opponent's reserves as the stock dwindles. The cards are learned in minutes; the judgement takes much longer.