First team to 1,500 points wins. You and your partner (North) play against two AI opponents across multiple rounds. Each round has 8 tricks worth a total of 162 card points.
Klaverjas is played with a 32-card deck — 7 through Ace in each suit. Both a card's rank (what beats what) and its point value change depending on whether it belongs to the trump suit. The Jack and the 9 leap from near-worthless to the two most valuable cards in the game the moment their suit is named trump, which is what makes the bid worth thinking about.
| Card | Trump rank | Trump points | Plain rank | Plain points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jack (J) | 1st — highest | 20 | 5th | 2 |
| Nine (9) | 2nd | 14 | 6th | 0 |
| Ace (A) | 3rd | 11 | 1st — highest | 11 |
| Ten (10) | 4th | 10 | 2nd | 10 |
| King (K) | 5th | 4 | 3rd | 4 |
| Queen (Q) | 6th | 3 | 4th | 3 |
| Eight (8) | 7th | 0 | 7th | 0 |
| Seven (7) | 8th — lowest | 0 | 8th — lowest | 0 |
| Suit total | — | 62 | — | 30 |
The trump suit is worth 62 points and each of the three plain suits 30 — 152 in all. Whoever takes the last trick adds 10, so every round puts exactly 162 card points on the table before any Roem.
Before each round, players bid to choose the trump suit or pass. The caller's team must score more trick points than the opponents — if they fail, all 162 points go to the other team (the Pit).
You must follow suit. If following trump, you must beat the highest trump in the trick if you can. If void of the led suit, you must trump and must overtrump existing trump — unless your partner is already winning. The trick winner leads next.
Sequences of 3+ cards in a suit score bonus points: 3-card run = 20, 4-card = 50, full marriage (K+Q of trump) = 20, Stuk = 20. Last trick bonus = 10 points.
Klaverjas (also spelled Klaberjass or Klaverjassen) is the Netherlands' most popular card game — a partnership trick-taking game played with a 32-card deck. It combines strategic bidding, strict obligation rules, and Roem bonus scoring into a deep but fast-paced card game.
This online version plays with full Amsterdams rules: mandatory overtrumping, Pit penalties for failed contracts, Stuk (King+Queen of trump), and sequence bonuses. Seven AI difficulty levels range from Beginner (random play) to Cyborg (optimal card counting with Roem maximization).
Play free in your browser — no account, no download. Challenge friends by sharing your match score directly from the game over screen.
Klaverjas runs two scoring games at the same time, and the design problem I cared most about was making the second one visible. Everyone sees the tricks — cards won, points counted at the end of the hand. What newcomers miss entirely is roem: the meld points earned during play itself, when runs of consecutive cards or four-of-a-kinds appear together inside a single trick. In the traditional Dutch game you announce roem as it happens, and half the skill of the table is simply noticing it in time. Online versions that tally roem silently at hand-end turn a live, dramatic mechanic into a line item on a receipt you read after the fact. So this build surfaces roem the moment it's earned — during the trick, as the cards land, the points appearing exactly where your eyes already are. The call was clarity over minimalism: if the game has a second scoring channel, the player deserves to watch it flow in real time.
Now to the mistakes, and Klaverjas offers two that compound each other beautifully. The first is miscounting trump honours. Trump cards in this game carry their own inflated values — the jack of trump is the boss at 20 points, the nine of trump sits second at 14 — and players who don't track which of these honours have already fallen are reading the hand off a wrong map. The biggest points in the hand move through those few specific cards; losing count of them means every late-game decision runs on pure guesswork.
The second mistake is forgetting the obligation. Klaverjas is not a polite game where you play whatever you like: you must follow suit, and on a trump trick you must overtrump when you're able to. That word — must — is where hoarded strategy goes to die. Players save a high trump for some imagined perfect moment, then a trump trick arrives, the obligation triggers, and the treasured card is forced out onto a trick it never wanted, at the worst possible time. The rules simply took it from them. A trump you're compelled to spend was never really yours to save in the first place.
So track which trumps are gone, always — the jack and the nine above all — and plan your honours around the compulsion, not around hope. Ask before every hold: is there a sequence of tricks that forces this card out of me? If yes, choose when it goes yourself, because a chosen moment is always better than a forced one.
The build handles the obligations, the AI plays an honest Dutch game, and the roem flows live where you can see it. The daily deal lands at midnight, same for everyone. Count the honours. Respect the must.