Trischaken

Trischaken is an historical Austrian, German and Polish gambling card game for three to five players. It appears related to French Brelan and German Scherwenzel.

The game dates back to the 16th century when it was played at court in the Kingdom of Poland. It is also mentioned as a card game in a 1706 German poem and listed as a banned gambling game in a 1734 law book of Anhalt-Bernburg. An indication of its distribution is given by its inclusion in a 1771 Bremen-Lower Saxon dictionary and its description as "popular" in Bavaria from at least the late 18th to mid-19th century. The word was also spelt dreschaken, meaning "to beat, thrash, cudgel", and may have been derived from dreschen, to thresh, recalling the game of Karnöffel whose name also means "to thrash". In 1871 it was described as a game of chance, popular with peasants "in the provinces" and played with the "large old German cards", which presumably meant 36- or even 48-card, German-suited packs.

Treschaken was equated with French Brelan and the game of Krimp, Krimpen or Krimpenspiel.

The Brothers Grimm give a brief description of Drischaken as a game for three to five players in which each receives 3 cards and the winner is the one who has the most cards of various possible combinations. They give various alternative spellings as drischäken, drischeken, dreschakn, trischaken and trischakeln. and adds that, "likewise karnöfeln means playing as well as thrashing", referring to another widespread card game of the time.

A detailed description in German of the rules of Brelan (aka Trischaken) is given in Pierer's Universal Lexikon, Volume 3 in 1868.

According to Popowitsch (1705–1774), the Austrian game of Trischack (Trischackspiel) was played with 3 cards and the Jack (Bub) or Nine – known as Pamfili – of each suit are wild. In Saxony and Silesia, they were called Wenzels or Scharwenzels. Thus it may have been related to the Bavarian game of Scherwenzel. However, Hommel equates Trischak to Grobhäusern which was essentially Scherwenzel without any wild cards.

In Austria, the Schärwenzel (i.e. the 7, 8 and 9 or the 7, 8 and Jack) was the highest card. In Franconia and Saxony, Trischaken was played with 4 cards per player using German-suited cards.

Tryszak (German: Treschak), also called Straszak and Fluss because a flush was an important feature, was an old gambling game that was popular at the beginning of the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski (reigned 1764–1795), but had been attested much earlier since there is a story that when King Sigismund I (reigned 1506–1548) was playing the game with two ministers, he was dealt two Kings but did not have a third one in his hand. So he claimed that he counted as the third king and thus ensured he won. A detailed description of the game is given by Chomentowski and reproduced by Łukasz Gołębiowski (1831).