About Lorum

What is Lorum?

Lorum is a traditional Central European card game for four players. A match is a sequence of contracts: avoidance trick-taking, then layout or counting games, with the lowest total at the end.

Players also know it as Lóra, Filky, Kačaba, Lora, and Lontar. The family sits near other compendium games such as Barbu. The shared idea is a changing list of mini-games, not a single trick-taking contract.

Where is it played?

Players associate versions of Lorum with Hungary, the Czech lands (especially the Kladno Lóra tradition), and neighbouring parts of Central and South-Eastern Europe. How common it is in any one town, and which list that town uses, is a family matter. We do not claim a single birthplace or a map of “correct” regions.

Why an online version?

Traditional games fade when people no longer sit at the same table they learned on. An online room — or a phone passed around a kitchen table — makes it easier to keep playing, and easier to show the game to someone who did not grow up with it.

The project

We originally built this as an experiment: how would the game work with more or fewer than four players? When we failed to find any “official” rules, we took on a new challenge — how many versions could we accommodate?

Now we aim to make Lorum accessible, playable, and easier to discover, without flattening house rules into one official script.