The history of Joker was never written down with exact dates. It is a folk game that passed from family to family, from courtyard to courtyard and from student rooms to summer houses. So you will not find invented years or a legend of "the first game" here. The game’s own structure tells a great deal, though: which family it belongs to, what it shares with games played elsewhere and what is purely Georgian — the khishti (the penalty for bidding and taking nothing), the premia (a bonus), the moshla (a strike-off) and a score sheet on which a score is written as 4.7. This article follows that trail.
Where Joker comes from
Joker belongs to a large family of card games in which each player says in advance how many tricks they will take and scores only for hitting that number exactly. Such games are played in many countries under many names; in the English-speaking world the best known is Oh Hell. The family resemblance is plain: the hands grow from one card and then shrink again, and the last bidder may not make a bid that would make the bids add up to the number of tricks — so in every hand somebody is bound to miss.
The game takes its name from the joker card. The joker was a later addition to European and American packs, and many games do not use it at all. In Georgian Joker it is the hero: the 36-card pack loses its two black sixes — the six of spades and the six of clubs — and two jokers take their place. A joker has no rank: each time it is played its owner declares whether it takes the trick or not. Those two declarations, mojokvra (taking with the joker) and gataneba (letting the trick go), are the most recognisable mark of Georgian Joker.
How it spread in Georgia
Joker is widely played in Georgia, and for many people it is a memory of childhood or student days. The game’s words show its path. Kozir (trump) and pulka (a block of hands scored together) look like borrowings from Russian card vocabulary, as do bezi (playing with no trump) and vinuzhdeni, which some call the last, forced bidder. Khishti, moshla, mojokvra and gataneba are Georgian words, and they describe the most Georgian part of the game. Even the name is heard two ways — jokeri and jokri — and both are correct; there is a separate article on that.
Another sign of how widely it spread is that the rules differ from family to family. In one house the khishti costs 200, in another 500, in a third it depends on the pulka. Some give the premia to every player who played the pulka exactly; others say "the last hand is struck" and leave the pulka’s final hand out when choosing the premia. No central body regulates these variations — they settle at the table, by agreement. That is the mark of a living folk game.
Joker in Georgian life
Joker is traditionally played by four and takes a long time: the standard game is 24 hands in four pulkas — one card up to eight, four nines, eight back down to one, and four more nines. It is an evening game, not five minutes of fun. A paper sheet and a pen are part of it: one player usually writes down everyone’s bid and result, and at the end of each pulka works out the premia and the moshla. Scores are written divided by a hundred — 470 is written "4.7", 1000 is written "10". It is shorthand, not a different score.
For two players Joker took shape as a separate game, Japanese Joker, with no bidding and open columns on the table. Where the name came from is not known for certain.
Joker is usually learned at the table, not from a book: first you watch the grown-ups play, then they let you keep the sheet, and finally they give you the fourth seat when someone is missing. So many people know the rules first as phrases — "caught a khishti", "took the premia", "got a moshla" — and only later learn how they are counted. For the same reason every Joker table has its own small traditions, and agreeing the rules before playing with a new group is perfectly normal. At the Georgian table Joker stands beside nardi, domino and bura — except that, unlike them, it needs exactly four people.
Example: reading an old-style score sheet
Nika’s eight hands in the first pulka are written as 100, 50, 150, 100, 200, 50, 250, 150. Every hand was made exactly — the fifties are successful passes — so Nika takes the premia: the pulka’s best hand, 250, is added once more.
- Hands added up: 100 + 50 + 150 + 100 + 200 + 50 + 250 + 150 = 1050.
- Premia: +250. The pulka total is 1300.
- The sheet shows "13".
- The other three, who missed at least once, face the moshla: each loses their own best hand. If Ana’s best hand was 200 and her pulka total 680, she keeps 480 — "4.8" on the sheet.
Keeping the sheet was a skill of its own: before each hand the scorer wrote all four bids, after it the result, and at the end of the pulka had to find each player’s best hand without mixing up who got the premia and who the moshla. That is where the arguments started, so the sheet was often trusted to the most careful player.
Joker today: online
Today Joker is also played on phones, in apps and on websites. Playing online changed two things: getting four players together is no longer a problem, and nobody writes the sheet by hand — the server counts the score, the khishti, the premia and the moshla. On tamashebi.cc Joker runs in the browser with nothing to download. The variety of house rules has become table settings: when creating a table you choose the khishti — 200, 500 or 100 per card — the premia and moshla, and the nines or the standard 24 hands. All of these are frozen when the match starts, so nobody argues about a rule halfway through. The server deals the cards and each player sees only their own hand.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Joker a Georgian game?
- Georgian Joker is the Georgian form of a wider family of games in which tricks are bid in advance. Two jokers in place of the black sixes, the khishti, the premia, the moshla and the score sheet in this form are typical of the Georgian table.
- When did Joker appear in Georgia?
- No exact date is known, and none is confirmed by reliable sources. Joker is a folk game that spread by word of mouth, so it pays to be careful when talking about its age.
- Why are scores written as 4.7?
- It is traditional shorthand: the score is divided by a hundred. 470 points is written "4.7" on the sheet, 1000 is "10".
Joker on tamashebi.cc is free and runs in the browser, on a phone too. Domino Coin is only a virtual coin: it is not money, cannot be bought and cannot be exchanged for money.
The games on Tamashebi.cc are played in a Georgian-language interface. They are free and use a virtual coin, never real money.