The players sit in a circle and the cards are placed face down in the center and mixed.
A single card is then flipped to face up to start the discard pile.
If a player cannot or does not wish to make a legal play, they instead pick up a card from the draw pile, and this also ends their turn.
This applies even if a player gets down to one card by non-standard means, such as trading hands with someone else.
The game usually ends when several rules combine to make continued play impossible.
New rules are introduced to Bartok by the winner of each round, making the game more complex as it progresses.
Common triggers include the ranks, faces and colours of played cards (and how those values relate to the current top card), and changes between suits and parities (odd to even, even to odd), but they may also be triggered by non-card events such as speaking (or failing to speak) a certain word when playing a card.
A penalty of one card is awarded for a number of illegal actions in Bartok.
As with other combination shedding and guessing games such as Mao, the rules can become quite complex.
The similarity between Mao and Bartok is such that the two games are sometimes referred to by the other's name.