Schwimmen Card Game Rules

Three cards in your hand, three face up in the middle, and one thing to do with them: swap, and keep swapping, until the cards you hold add up to as much as possible in a single suit. Thirty-one is the ceiling. Whoever holds the weakest cards when a hand ends pays a life, and Schwimmen works for anything from 2 to 8 players.

Three lives each is the usual start. The player who hands over the last one is swimming, and that is the German the game is named after. Swimming is not the same as out: you play on, and only the next lost hand ends it for you. Whoever is still there at the finish has won.

Germany and western Austria play it most, under Einunddreißig, Schnauz and Knack as well as Schwimmen. It was once banned outright in Austria-Hungary, where the justice ministry filed it under the name Feuer.

A 32-card pack: 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king and ace in each suit. Strip everything from 2 to 6 out of an ordinary deck and leave the jokers out.

Every player also needs three lives, meaning three small objects they can push into the middle when they lose a hand. Matches, coins or poker chips all work. More lives each makes for a longer game.

No pen and paper. A hand is added up in your head and the lives sit on the table where everyone can count them.

Cards count the same in every suit:

Your hand is worth the total of the cards in one suit, and you pick whichever suit suits you best. ♥️7, ♥️9 and ♠️K is worth 16, counting the two hearts. ♠️8, ♦️9 and ♠️J is worth 18.

That is why 31 is the ceiling: an ace and two ten-value cards in the same suit, say ♣️A, ♣️K and ♣️10.

The dealer gives three cards face down to each player, then an extra hand of three to one side.

The dealer looks at their own three and decides whether to keep them or take the spare hand instead. That decision has to be made before seeing the spare, so it is a straight gamble.

Whichever hand the dealer rejects is turned face up in the middle of the table. Those three cards are shared, and they are what everyone swaps with.

The player to the dealer's left starts and play goes clockwise. You have three options:

• Swap one card from your hand for one of the three face-up cards.
• Swap all three of your cards for all three on the table.
• Pass and do nothing.

Swapping two cards is not allowed. One, or all three.

If everyone passes in turn, the three face-up cards are swept away and three new ones come off the rest of the pack. Play then carries on as before.

Happy with your hand? At the end of your turn you may close. Everyone else then gets one more turn, and after that the cards go face up and the hands are compared.

Two hands have to be shown the moment you have them, whether they arrived with the deal or after a swap. The hand ends there and nobody gets another exchange.

• Schnauz, also called 31: three cards of one suit adding up to 31, meaning an ace and two ten-value cards.
• Feuer: three aces, worth 32.

Show schnauz and the weakest hand at the table pays a life, as usual. Show feuer and every other player pays one.

Feuer is the top of the game and rare enough that most players remember the time they had it.

When the hand ends everyone turns their cards up. Each player counts their best suit, and three of a kind counts separately.

Three of a kind is worth 30.5, which is enough to beat thirty in a suit but not 31. Three aces are the exception at 32.

The lowest hand pays a life. When two players tie, a higher three of a kind beats a lower one in the order ace, king, queen, jack, 10, 9, 8, 7. When equal totals sit in different suits, the suits rank as in Skat: clubs highest, then spades, hearts and diamonds.

If the two weakest hands are equal and in the same suit, both players pay.

Every hand you lose costs one life, pushed into the middle of the table. Run out and you are swimming. You are still in, but you have nothing left to give.

Lose a hand while swimming and you are out, and the others carry on without you.

The game ends when one player remains. If the last two are left holding equal hands in the same suit when one of them closes, they share the win, or they play one more hand to settle it.

These rules describe Schwimmen as played in Germany and Austria: 32 cards, three-card hands, three lives per player, swapping against three face-up cards, and schnauz at 31 and feuer at 32 shown the instant they appear. Three of a kind counts 30.5. The Dutch version, the four-card game with a ceiling of 41 and the variant without three of a kind are covered under variants.