How to play Siege Durak

A card game variant invented through misremembered rules

A four-player game of Siege Durak with three attackers and one defender.

It began with a casual, “What were the rules again?” followed by 20 minutes of dubious misremembering and became a fun and apparently unique variant of a card game “popular in post-Soviet states.”

For the uninitiated, Durak (Russian for “fool”) is a simple and flexible card game with subtly deep strategy. The standard game can accommodate as few as two players and as many as six, making it a situationally appropriate game for most groups, and only has a single loser (the durak if you will), which tends to result in more happy players. It also works very naturally as a drinking game.

Understanding this variant which I’ve dubbed “Siege Durak” requires knowledge of the standard rules, which you can read about in full here, or learn by watching the following video:

Overview

Standard Durak is played with a single attacker at a time, and a single attack card at a time. Siege Durak forgets this rule and allows both for multi-card attacks, and for…