Slabberjan (1750)

A traditional Dutch game from the Zeeland region, very similar to the version of the Danish-Norwegian game Gnav or the Swedish Kille, played with wooden pawns rather than cards, of which it is a derivative; all of these games are actually reimplements of the 16th century French 'hazard' card game Coucou, later popularized in 17th century Italy as Cuccú (Cuckoo).

A set consists of 42 wooden pawns with a number or picture hidden under the base. Each of the 21 subject occurs twice: the numbers from 0 to 12, the trumps "Rider", "Bird", "Cat" and "Inn" above the numbers, and "Whitebread", "Mug", "Pot" and "Jester" below.

At the beginning of the game, each player recieves a number of point tokens. In each round, each player draws one pawn from a bag and secretly looks at its value. Then the players in order decides whether to keep their pawn or trade it with the following player. If that player holds a trump, special rules for each trump applies, otherwise the pawns are traded. At the end of the round, the player with the lowest valued pawn loses one of their point tokens.

A player who runs out of point tokens is out of the game. The last remaining player is the winner.

It is not known exactly when this little known variant first appeared. It must be after the the wooden pawn variant of Gnav – originally a card game – gained popularity as an effect of a ban on playing cards by the pietist king Christian VI of Denmark-Norway (1730–1746). On the other hand it probably did not happen very much later, as it lacks a couple of the developments otherwise separating Gnav from other games in the Cuccu family.

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