This game is even worse than 30 Seconds

For a game night, I'm always up for it. I consider myself quite to very good at 30 Seconds (not everyone always agrees), but I can also play card games all night long. Or dice, which I mainly did in the pub back in the day. With games, I always have a bit of a phase: sometimes it's all about 30 Seconds and then for months it's cards again.

I was away for a week with three friends, and usually, we spend the whole evening playing toepen. And in the meantime, of course, we drink, and the more we drink, the worse we play. But one of my friends is of Armenian descent and said on the second evening that he knew a really fun Iranian card game. He would teach us the next day.

Well... We found out. Mi gado, it was intense from the very first moment. You play in teams of two, so in our case, two teams, and it's a bit of a mix of guessing tricks and playing Klaverjassen. And because you play in teams, you can really get on each other's nerves. Like when one person messes up a trick, for example. Or when someone takes a trick that wasn't necessary. It gets pretty heated — at least for us. While we were casually chatting and drinking during toepen, it was dead silent here. Utter concentration.

So we played this without joke for five evenings in a row, and I think we've never talked so little to each other during a week away. Sometimes someone suggested, ‘Shouldn't we maybe go back to toepen? It's more fun for the atmosphere,’ and then the other three would shout very loudly ‘NO’ and we would continue playing this game in silence and sometimes cursing at each other.

And on that fifth evening, it went wrong. After a few drinks, the teams couldn't agree, and it turned into a real argument, where my teammate Arima and I were, of course, right, although the losers would never admit that. Silly. The next morning, we unanimously decided that we are not mature enough for this card game and went back to toepen for the sake of peace.

So you have been warned: this game is really worse than 30 Seconds, Monopoly, and Risk combined. Guaranteed frustration but at the same time so addictively fun. It's called Hokm and you can find the rules here in English.

It comes down to the fact that when you play with four people, you have two teams of two, each with 13 cards. Before dealing, everyone takes turns revealing an open card, and whoever gets the Ace first gets to deal and determines the trump.

The person who is in the team with the dealer sits opposite him/her (so you sit alternately), and the team that wins seven tricks first wins the round. You have to confess, and if you can't, you can throw away the trump (or ‘dive‘ it with another color, that's part of the teamwork). Whoever has won five rounds first is the winner. And that doesn't happen without a fight.

Apologies in advance for the arguments that are guaranteed to come, but it really is a fun game.

P.S.: A shout-out to the absolute worst losers Bas and Julia is definitely in order.