‎. Listed on Games Magazine's Electronic Games 100 for 2011!. Shall I Teach You About Tichu? Legend has it that over 642 million Chinese play Tichu nearly every day! I don't know about that. All I know is that Tichu might very well be the world's best card game. Tichu is a partnership game fo. 21,779 likes 12 talking about this. Www.onlinetichu.com Contact @ onlinetichu@gmail.com. Welcome to Online Tichu! The best place, with the best players, to play tichu online! Sign in Forgot your Password? Online Tichu 2021 - v38 - onlinetichu@gmail.com. Tichu also introduces 4 special cards. The Phoenix and the Dragon replace the 2 jokers in the Chinese game. In the Chinese game, the jokers can be used as the highest single cards or as wild cards in combinations. 2006 Nederlandse Spellenprijs nominee.

• Tichu Paper
• Tichu Online Card Game

Tichu is a climbing card game (in the same family as “President” or “Asshole”) descended from Zheng Fen with a few less combinations and different “bombs” but with partnerships, card passing, four special cards, and extra scoring. And, while the card play and scoring of the parent game are sufficiently and tactically interesting in their own right, each of these additions, in their way, serve to increase the number of decision points and, consequently, the feelings of tension you will have throughout the game. Amongst these, however, partnerships are the linch-pin; each of the others ties back to this in some way.

Partnership play, by its nature, increases poignancy as you and your partner’s fate become inextricably bound and you worry from beginning to end whether it will be your decisions that cost you both the hand; or, worse, the game. Almost all of your decisions are tempered by this consideration; not only how this choice will affect yourself, but of how it will affect your partner. And it begins even before all the cards are dealt, when you are offered the opportunity to gamble, on behalf of you and your partner no less, on whether you will be the first player to void their hand (i.e. call “Tichu”). It continues into the decision over which card should be passed to which player and what signal you wish to convey to your partner about the strength or weakness of your hand. Are you positive you want to pass them the Dog and help yourself but also risk destroying what might otherwise have been an overwhelmingly strong Tichu hand for your partner? Perhaps you should keep the Dog and pass that Dragon of yours over to your partner instead? This constant pressure, however, also serves to magnify the burst of relief or joy you will feel at the end of an especially well played hand. The scoring, in particular, is excellently engineered to sustain tension and drive players to shed cards throughout the hand. It is also tied into, and re-enforcing of, the partnership aspect of the game.

Regardless of whether or not Tichu has been called, having one member of your team go out first will always be paramount. The benefits for this include the obvious potential for making (or stopping) a Tichu bid and scoring any point cards collected in the tricks of the player who went out last, but, perhaps most importantly, it also sets your team up for the possibility of going out first and second (or, “getting a Slam”). Because of this threat, after one player has gone out the pressure to shed cards remains wonderfully undiminished as you must now concentrate on going out second to either make or stop a Slam as this can result in a huge two to four (if Grand Tichu was bid) hundred point swing in fortunes for one team or the other. And, finally, while the pressure does ease off when you get down to the last two players, the scoring incentives available for not losing the point cards you’ve collected in tricks still continue the drive to shed cards until the bitter end. All of these objectives combine to help make even a poor hand feel somehow worthwhile as you can gear your efforts to supporting the team, be it ever so humble or cruel a contribution as to hold the Phoenix in your hand as you deliberately go out last!

And, so, to end this rather lengthy comment, I will say that after over 3 years of collecting and researching games, and after several thousand dollars invested so far, I am surprised yet delighted to find that the game I like most – far more than any other game – is one that can be played with a barely modified standard deck of cards! Heck, I’d be happy if this was the only game I owned – I like it that much. If I had gained nothing else from my time exploring the world of board games, it would have been worth it just to be aware of this game’s existence.

Tichu Paper

Tichu Online Card Game

May 30, 2009: Got the mythical 14 card straight!