A Nibble Workshop Game
Preferans
Three Players · Ten Tricks · One Contract
A classic Balkan trick-taking card game, faithfully reproduced. Bid for the contract, pick up the talon, and outplay two opponents at the felt table.
Native for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Four bot difficulty levels per seat, a classic paper score sheet, and full support for English, Serbian and Croatian.
iPhone · iPad · Mac
How It Works
One deal, three roles.
Every hand starts the same way — a 32-card deck, ten cards each, two face-down in the talon. What happens next depends on who wins the bidding.
Bid for the Contract
Players bid in turn up a fixed ladder — 2♠, 3♦, 4♥, 5♣, Betl (no tricks at all), Sans (no trump). On your very first call you can also announce a hand Game worth even more, played straight from your ten cards with no talon at all.
Take the Talon, Declare
Win the auction and the two talon cards are revealed face-up for everyone — public information, exactly as the rules require. Take them into your hand, discard back down to ten, then declare: the contract you bid, or any higher one.
Play It Out
Ten tricks, declarer against two defenders. Each defender chooses to whist in or stay out, either side can double with a kontra, and if one defender passes, the other may call them back in as a partner.
Gameplay
Every card, custom illustrated.
Double-headed court cards, an ornate gilded back, and a bidding ladder that never leaves you guessing what's still on the table.
Opponents
Four difficulty levels, one per seat.
Every seat — left, right, even yours in Watch mode — picks its own bot strength independently. Mix them to feel the difference.
Junior
A heuristic player with plenty of room for error — the easiest table, built for learning the ropes.
Medior
The same heuristic foundation, sharpened — far fewer mistakes, steadier defense.
Senior
Genuine search: samples the unseen hands and looks ahead before every bid, whist call and card played.
Expert
The deepest search available, aware of doubling risk and full auction context — a real test even for a strong player.
Flip on Aggressive Bidding for any Senior or Expert seat and it starts declaring marginal contracts more often — a livelier table, but a well-timed kontra can make it pay.
Two Ways to Play
Sit at the table, or pull up a chair.
Play vs Bots seats you across from two computer opponents at any difficulty. Switch to Watch Bots and every seat — including the one usually yours — is played by a bot.
Pick each seat's level independently and watch three bots play out a full match, start to finish. It's one of the easiest ways to learn how bidding, the talon, and card play come together at the table.
The Ledger
Kept exactly like on paper.
- • Three columns, one per player — the classic bula ledger, right down to the crossed-out refa marks and the top hat the moment someone's balance crosses zero.
- • Set your own starting bula (the traditional match is 100 per player) and how many refas — doubled next deals — each player may write over a match.
- • Leave mid-match and continue later exactly where you stopped, bots and all.
- • Have to stop for good? Write off and save the result — the remaining bula settles fairly and nobody's standing changes.
Every Hand, Reviewed
A full transcript for every deal.
Every completed deal is written out in full — every hand as it was dealt, the bidding call by call, the talon and what was discarded, and every trick with who won it.
Copy it, share it, or scroll back after a strange bot decision to see exactly what happened. Past matches are saved to Results, each with its own match log — even matches you wrote off early.
Play Your Way
Two styles, four languages.
Serbian and Croatian Preferans are the same game rule-for-rule — the only difference is the direction of play, Serbian counter-clockwise and Croatian clockwise. Automatic style follows your chosen language, or set it explicitly in Settings.
The full interface — the auction ladder, the score sheet, the match log — is available in English, Serbian (Latin), Serbian (Cyrillic), and Croatian.
Platforms
One app, three screens.
A single purchase unlocks Preferans everywhere you play.
iPhone
Landscape at the table
Cards fanned out just like at a real table. The score sheet is the one screen that turns with you into portrait — everything else stays landscape.
iPad
Any orientation
Portrait or landscape, full support either way — bigger cards and more of the table visible at once.
Mac
Native window
A resizable, native macOS app — the same rules, the same bots, the same score sheet, right on your desktop.
Deal me in.
Preferans is available now for iPhone, iPad and Mac.