Bester Bube

The game goes under a variety of dialectical names, some named after the top card the "Best Bower"; these include Bester Bube or Bester Bauer (High German); Bester Buern or Bester Buur (Hamburg); Besten Buur (Holsteinish) or Beste Boer(en) (Dutch). Alternatively it may be named after the five cards dealt to a hand e.g. Fünfkart (High German), Fiefkarten; Fiefkaart, Fiefkort or Fiefander (Holsteinish). A third name relates to the flush or sequence that sometimes scores in the game; these include Lenter (East Frisian); Lenterspiel (Low German); Lanterlu, Lanturlu or Lanterlui (Dutch). The latter is clearly related to the English name of the game Lanterloo.

The game is recorded in the 18th and 19th centuries in German and Dutch game anthologies and dictionaries, appearing as early as 1781, in a Low German dictionary where it is equated with Lenter-Spiel,[3] and in 1785, as Bestebauer-Spiel, a game with its aficionados in Göttingen.[4] In 1802 it is mentioned as a "people's card game" in a Holstein dialect dictionary, both as "Lenter" and "Besten Buur", and buuren is described as "playing the card game of besten Bauren [sic], in which the Spadenbuur or Pique Bauer ("Jack of Spades", also figuratively a foolish person) is the highest card which beats all the others."[5][6] It is also recorded in 1808 in Das neue königliche l'Hombre as "Bester Bube"[7] and by 1836 Fünfkart was described as a game played by the lower classes in Mecklenburg, exclusively with French-suited cards, alongside Dreikart, Schafskopf and Solo, while the dignitaries played Whist, Boston, Ombre, Faro and, less often, Solo as well.[8]

In 1853 Von Alvensleben included it in his 1853 Encyclopädie der Spiele.[9] It is still current in the 1905 edition of Meyer's Großes Konversations-Lexikon, but by 1950 it appears to have dropped out of favour, being then described by Culbertson and Hoyle as "an obsolete card game similar to Loo".[10] The games scholar David Parlett includes it in his 2008 Book of Card Games, but agrees that it is "defunct".[11]

It appears to be a regional game: Parlett suggests it was played in the south and west of Germany, but it is also recorded in north Germany, for example in the area of Celle in Lower Saxony and[12] in Hamburg,[13] where it also appears to have been known as Bester Buern or Bester Buur.[3][14] Its rules are first recorded in Das neue königliche l'Hombre in 1808[7] and then appear in a Dutch card game handbook of 1810 as Beste Boer or Lanterlu,[15] and subsequently as Beste Boeren or Lanterlui in 1828 and 1844.[16] The game was known in the East Frisian dialect as Lenter, which also referred to the possession of five trumps in the game, also called a Bauerchen,[17] or to the five top trumps. Lenter was equated to the English Lanterloo or Lanteraloo and the Dutch Lanterlu or Lanturlu,[18] and the Holsteinisches Idiotikon of 1800 also states that the Bower of Spades was the highest trump, indicating that in the earliest rules there was just one fixed top trump card, unlike the later rules which introduce 2 variable ones and more complex rules. In Holstein, the game was also called Fiefkaart or Fiefander.[19][20]

Bester Bube may be related to Juckerspiel and hence Euchre; the last was described by Parlett as "characterised by the promotion of two Jacks to topmost position as Right and Left Bowers, a feature variously represented or paralleled in late 18th-early 19th century west German games such as Réunion, Bester Bube and Kontraspiel."[21]

Bester Bube (pronounced "Boober") means "Best Jack" or "Best Bower" (the original names Bester Buur or Bester Bauer meant "best farmer") and is named after its highest card, originally the Jack of Spades,[5] but later the trump Jack.[9][11] The second highest trump is the jack of the same suit colour, the Unterbube[22] ("Under Bower" or "Under Jack") or Nebenbube ("Side Bower" or "Side Jack").[9]

Although Bester Bube is sometimes equated in the literature with Five Cards (Fiefkort, Fünfkart, etc.), the latter may have been played without the feature of two top Jacks and hence why Seelmann, in commenting on Reuter's 1867 work, De Reis’ nah Konstantinopel, reports that Fünfkart "was mostly called Fiefkort mit'n besten Buren."[23]

Bester Bube is played between 3 to 6 players using a 32-card Piquet pack of French-suited cards. The following rules are based on von Alvensleben.[9]

In the trump suit, cards rank as follows: Best Bower, Under Bower, Ace, King, Queen, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven; and, in the remaining suits: Ace, King, Queen, (Jack), Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven.

• _ (1808). Das neue Königliche l’Hombre nebst einer gründlichen Anweisung wie Quadrille..., J.G. Herold, Frankfurt and Leipzig
• _ (1821). Nieuwe beschrijving der meest gebruikelijke kaartspelen, zoo als die hier te lande gespeeld worden. H. Moolenijzer, Amsterdam.
• _ (1907). Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung, Volumes 28-33.
• _ (1967). Schleswig-Holstein, Schleswig-Holsteinischer Heimatbund.
• Culbertson, Ely and Edmond Hoyle (1950). Culbertson's Hoyle: The New Encyclopedia of Games. Greystone Press.
• Dähnert, Johann Carl (1781). Platt-deutsches Wörter-Buch: nach der alten und neuen Pommerschen und Rügischen Mundart, Christian Lorenz Struck, Stralsund.
• Hoffmann, Karl Friedrich Vollrath (1836). Deutschland und seine Bewohner, Vol. 4. Stuttgart: J. Scherble.
• List, Gottlieb Christian Heinrich (1785). Beyträge zur Statistik von Göttingen. Berlin.
• Mensing, Otto (1928). Schleswig-Holsteinisches Wörterbuch, Vol. 2 (F–J), Neumünster: Wachholtz.
• Meyer, Adolf and Hans Türschmann (2004). Endeholz: Quellen und Darstellungen zur Geschichte des Dorfes und seiner Einwohner, Türschmann, Endeholz.
• Parlett, David (1990). The Oxford Guide to Card Games. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
• Parlett, David (2008). The Penguin Book of Card Games, Penguin, London. ISBN 978-0-141-03787-5
• Seelmann, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm, ed. (1880). Reuters Werke, Vol. 6. Leipzig, Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut.
• Schütze, Johann Friedrich (1800). Holsteinisches Idiotikon, Part 1 (Buuren), Villaume, Hamburg.
• Schütze, Johann Friedrich (1802). Holsteinisches Idiotikon, Part 3 (Lenter), Villaume, Hamburg.
• Stürenburg, Cirk Heinrich (1857). Ostfriesisches Wörterbuch. Carl Otto Sende, Aurich.
• Von Alvensleben, L. (1853). Encyclopädie der Spiele. Otto Wigand, Leipzig.
• Wachholtz, K. (1910). Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins für Niederdeutsche Sprachforschung, Volume 30.