The Origin of Murlan
Most card games come with a tidy history: a date, a place, a name. Murlan doesn't, and that is part of the charm. It was never really written down so much as handed over, one player to the next. Here is where it comes from, and what makes it ours.
Learned by playing
Ask anyone in Albania where they learned Murlan and you won't hear about a book or an app. You'll hear about a kitchen, an uncle, a long winter evening. Someone older shuffled, you sat in, you lost a few hands, and at some point the rules stopped being rules and turned into instinct. That is how the game gets around, from one pair of hands to the next, across Albania and Kosovo and anywhere Albanians have taken a deck of cards with them. No two tables play it quite the same way, and everyone swears their version is the right one.
Part of a bigger family
Murlan didn't appear out of nowhere. It belongs to a wide family that players call climbing games, or shedding games, and the idea behind all of them is the same. You take turns, each play has to beat the one before it or you pass, and the first person to empty their hand wins. The cousins are spread across the world. China has Big Two and the older Zheng Shangyou, usually named as the game the whole family grew out of. Vietnam has Tiến Lên, played so widely it is treated as the national card game. Japan has Daihinmin, which much of the West knows as President. None of them were copied from one another. They were carried across borders, changed by whoever picked them up, and renamed along the way. Murlan is the Albanian branch of the same tree.
What makes Murlan different
Play any of the cousins and the basics of Murlan will feel familiar, so the interesting part is where it lines up with some and parts ways with others. The high 2 is a family trait, because in Big Two, Tiến Lên and President the 2 is also one of the strongest cards, and Murlan keeps it just below the Jokers. The deck is where it picks a side. Big Two and Tiến Lên use a plain pack of 52 cards with no jokers at all, while Daihinmin, the Japanese version of President, adds jokers, and Murlan does the same by using both of them as its two highest cards. The strongest link is the swap, where after each round the loser gives their best card to the winner and gets a weaker one back. That exchange is the heart of President and Daihinmin, and Big Two and Tiến Lên have nothing like it. Bombs feel closer to Tiến Lên, where four of a kind exists mainly to beat those powerful 2s, and Murlan gives bombs and runs in one suit the same job of breaking an ordinary play. One habit sets it apart from Big Two in particular: Murlan never stops when the first player goes out, but keeps going until every hand is empty and scores by who came first, second and third, which is much closer to how President is played.
Murlan today
For most of its life Murlan lived offline, with real cards, a real table, and a fair amount of arguing about whose house rules were right, and that is still the best way to play it. But the game travels further now than it ever could before. Murlan Arena exists to keep it moving, so that someone can pick up the rules at their own pace, practise against opponents who don't mind losing, and find a game whether or not there is a table nearby. The story is still being passed on. The hands just look a little different.
Further reading
- Climbing games, a tour of the whole family (pagat.com)
- Big Two, the Chinese game often named as the family's root (Wikipedia)
- Zheng Shangyou, an older Chinese ancestor of the group (Wikipedia)
- Tiến Lên, the national climbing game of Vietnam (pagat.com)
- Daihinmin, known in the West as President, the Japanese cousin (Wikipedia)