“Bonken” is the name of a card game I learned to play whilst studying in Delft. If you Google for “Bonken” you’ll find it is around on Wikipedia and gamerules.com. You can find it back on a few Dutch websites as well, such as kaartspeluitleg.nl and wikibooks.org. Apparently it has become very popular at the Bossche Bedrijfs Tafeltennis Federatie.
The word bonken has various meanings that don’t always have a positive connotation.
For us it has just been a great game to play at the end of an evening of socializing and fun. But it seems we’ve been playing it with slightly different rules than those published on several sites listed above. In ‘our version‘ twelve out of thirteen available games were played, so each player has three chances to select a game. Obviously the choice reduces as the game progresses, as each game can only be played once.
| # | Game | Tricks | Weight | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | No King of Hearts | 1 | -100 | -100 |
| 2 | No Queens | 4 | -45 | -180 |
| 3 | No Gents | 8 | -25 | -200 |
| 4 | No Tricks (Duck) | 13 | -10 | -130 |
| 5 | No 7th / 13th | 2 | -50 | -100 |
| 6 | No Last Trick | 1 | -100 | -100 |
| 7 | Domino | 1 | -100 | -100 |
| 8 | No Hearts | 13 | -10 | -130 |
| 9 | Spades | 13 | 20 | 260 |
| 10 | Hearts | 13 | 20 | 260 |
| 11 | Diamonds | 13 | 20 | 260 |
| 12 | Clubs | 13 | 20 | 260 |
| 13 | No Trumps | 13 | 20 | 260 |
| Total | 0 |
Please note that out of the last five (no-) trump games only four are being played. Each player needs to play (no-) trump once in the game, therefore one of these five games ends up unused.
As you are allowed to double your opponents, score keeping can become quite daunting, in particular when the evening progresses and the beers keep coming around. Evidence of this is shown in the next two score sheets that somehow avoided being binned.
So I thought it must be easier than that, and earlier I developed a little program for my PDA which is history now. Therefore, I now created an Excel spreadsheet instead, that you can pickup from the download area. I hope you find it fun to use and easy to tweak.