Schieber rules in plain English

Cards and players

Jass is played with 36 cards. There are four suits of nine cards each: Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Banner (the Ten, which shows a banner on Swiss cards), Under and Ober (the two court cards below the King), King and Ace. In German-speaking Switzerland the suits are Acorns (Eicheln), Roses (Rosen), Bells (Schellen) and Shields (Schilten). With French cards the suits are Diamonds, Hearts, Clubs and Spades, and instead of the Under and the Ober you have the Jack and the Queen.

Four people sit at a Schieber table. The two sitting opposite each other play together. Everyone gets nine cards, which the dealer deals in threes. Play goes anticlockwise, and after every round the next player deals. On wyys.ch you can set at the table whether you play with Swiss or French cards. The rules stay the same.

Calling trump and Schieben

The player to the dealer’s right looks at their cards and decides how this round is played. They can make one suit trump. They can also call Obenabe, which means no trump and the Ace as the highest card, or Undenufe, which means no trump either, but with the order turned upside down: the Six is the highest card.

If the player to the dealer’s right has no good call, they may say Schieben, which passes the choice to their partner. The partner then has to call, no exceptions, and can’t pass it back. Whatever happens, the player to the dealer’s right leads the first trick, even when the partner made the call. Schieben literally means ‘pushing’, and it is what gave the game its name.

Jass players follow an unwritten rule here: if you said Schieben and your partner picks a suit, you lead your highest trump first. That way your partner learns straight away where the trumps are. The bots on wyys.ch stick to it.

Card order and card values

In trump the order differs from the other suits. The trump Under is called the Buur and is the highest card in the whole game. Next comes the trump Nine, the Nell. After them come the Ace, King, Ober, Banner, Eight, Seven and Six. Every trump beats every card of another suit.

In the other suits and in Obenabe the usual order applies: Ace, King, Ober, Under, Banner, Nine, Eight, Seven and Six. In Undenufe it is exactly reversed, and the Six beats everything in its suit.

There are 152 points in the cards in every round. The team that takes the last trick gets 5 more, so 157 in total. If a team takes all nine tricks, that’s a Match, and it scores 100 extra points, 257 in all.

How a trick is won

The player who leads plays any card. The others each add one card in turn. A few rules apply, and they are quick to learn:

• You have to follow the suit led if you hold it.
• You may trump at any time, even if you could still follow suit.
• Undertrumping is not allowed. If a trump is already in the trick, you may not add a lower one, unless you have nothing but trumps left in your hand.
• If trump is led, you have to play trump. You may always keep back the Buur, though. If it’s your only trump left, you play another card.
• The trick goes to the highest card of the suit led or to the highest trump. The player who takes the trick leads the next one.

On wyys.ch you don’t have to remember all of this. Cards you may not play are dimmed, and the game won’t let you make a wrong move. That way you pick up the rules almost without noticing.

Weis, Stöck and multipliers

Besides the tricks, Weis score points too. A Weis is a bonus combination in your hand, for example a run of at least three cards of one suit or four of a kind. You declare it with your first card. Only the team with the highest Weis scores, but it scores all of its Weis. The King and Ober of trump in the same hand are called Stöck and are worth 20 points. Stöck always counts, even if the opponents have the higher Weis. All the values and the rules for comparing Weis are in the article on Weis and Stöck.

In Schieber every point in a round is multiplied by the factor of the call. That goes for tricks, the last trick, the Match, Weis and Stöck. By default wyys.ch plays with these multipliers:

Not every Jass table counts the same. Some count Undenufe four times, others count everything once and play to 1,000 points. That is why the host on wyys.ch can set each multiplier separately and switch off Weis, Stöck or Obenabe and Undenufe altogether.

End of the game and the Bergpreis

You play to a target score. With multipliers the usual target is 2,500 points, without them 1,000. The game ends the moment a team reaches the target, even in the middle of a round. So it pays to count carefully towards the end.

It can happen that both teams reach the target in the same round. Then the points are counted in a fixed order: Stöck first, then Weis, and the tricks last. That decides who got there first.

Along the way there is the Bergpreis. It goes to the team that first passes a certain mark. On wyys.ch, with a target of 2,500 points, that mark is 1,500 by default. Some tables put it at half the target, so the host can also choose half the target or a number of their own, or leave the Bergpreis out altogether. There are no points for the Bergpreis, only the honour.

Play Schieber online on wyys.ch

On wyys.ch you play Schieber free in your browser, without an account and without ads. You can play on your own against three bots straight away, or open a table and send the code to your friends. Bots play the empty seats until someone joins. The game runs on a phone just as it does on a computer, and if your connection drops for a moment, your seat stays reserved for you.

Once Schieber feels familiar, the other games are worth a look. In Coiffeur each team plays every call exactly once, in Differenzler you predict your points in advance, and in Molotow you want to take as few points as possible. The short version of all the rules is on the rules page.