Durak is probably the most popular card game in post-Soviet countries, and the first card game I learned as a child. It’s traditionally played with a 36-card deck, but there are many variants, and house rules are common.
The goal of Durak is to shed all your cards, and not end up as the last one standing. I will not explain the rules in full here, but there is a decent Wikipedia page on it (link).
What follows is a rough description of some strategies I have noticed and thought about. It needs a lot of work.
The strategy that most people will have is to direct their attack towards the person immediately to their right, let’s call them Rick, because Rick is the person who will otherwise attack them. Additionally, people will tend to go easy on whoever Rick’s attacker is, call them Becky, because it’s in their best interest to prevent Becky from losing their turn, and letting Rick attack.
This is a good rule of thumb: preventing attacks is usually good for you. But it never clicked for me as a strategy, because often, attacking your “ally” (Becky) is worth it for the cards that you can get rid of. Following this strategy commonly leads to me missing these opportunities, and you can’t really control incoming attacks that well in the first place.
I think part of the problem is that I tend to think more in terms of material than “who gets to play” and whether I will be spared an attack or not. Being prepared for whatever people decide to play feels like a more reliable strategy to me, so over time I developed a more “matrial-oriented” strategy I like to use.
This isn’t groundbreaking or anything, but hear me out: the main idea that drives your decisions is important. For most people this is attacking and defending, leaving the quality of their hand as something that’s supposed to come from successfully dodging attacks and shedding cards towards their attacker.
What I’m proposing instead is to consider the balance of cards in your hand as the main focus of the game. Divide your hand in two halves, trump cards on the left and other suits on the right, all ordered by rank. The ratio between these two halves is the most important metric I look at.
You can split the game as you would in chess. The opening is the initial phase, the middlegame begins when the talon is starting to run low, and the endgame is when the talon is exhausted. If you can get to the endgame with little to no plain cards, you’re likely to finish first, so that’s the number one goal.
In the opening, the goal is to slowly build up trump cards. I don’t necessarily mind having a few plain cards, since there are many cards in the talon and many chances to get rid of it. Using up trump cards at this point is something I would almost never do; I’d much rather pick up some bad cards instead.
If I get unlucky and keep gathering cards, I will reluctantly use up trump cards to get a chance to attack, and improve the ratio once more. If you don’t take the “help your attacker’s attacker” rule too seriously, there are many other chances to attack even if it’s not your turn, so this doesn’t happen as often as you’d think.
This usually maintains some sort of an equilibrium. As your hand grows beyond 6, your chances of getting fresh cards decreases, so shedding cards is beneficial unless most of your cards are trump cards. Playing trump cards early on is a really bad idea, because there are only so many; the chances of having a trump card when you have a trump card are 100%, while the chances of getting a fresh trump card once you’ve used it are… lower.
As you reach the middlegame, having plain cards becomes a lot more of a liability, so the strategy now is to get rid of them a lot more aggressively, even if you have to use trump cards. By the time you get to the endgame you need to get rid of everything, including trump cards.