On the basis of the first eight cards, any player may invoke a Grand Tichu (described later). First, each player takes eight cards and looks at them. Throughout the game, communication between partners is absolutely forbidden, but not table talk is not strictly defined (although wincing at your cards probably counts).Įach round, the cards are shuffled and spread out in the middle of the table. Also, it's possible to go negative, so the game could (in theory) go on for an infinite length of time.Īll four players sit in a circle the players sitting across from one another from two teams. The first team to reach 1,000 points wins. The game is played over the course of multiple rounds. The game is played with a traditional 52 card deck, with four extra cards: the Dragon, the Phoenix, the Faithful Hound, and the Mahjong. With that said - grab your partner, come up with a team name, and let's teach you some Tichu! And I think the game is special, insofar as its mechanics tend to reward belligerence.

As a warning, it has a tendency to really bring out the trash-talk (somewhat weirdly there appears to be an consensus on this). Tichu is quite bewildering at first, but enormously fun - and perhaps harmfully addictive to left-brained types.

It's also inspired a couple of other games (well, at least one) with similarly egregious nationalistic theming - for instance, the conspicuously Scottish game, Haggis 1. However, Tichu's core mechanics are based on an amalgamation of older Mainland-Chinese traditional card games in the 'king-ten-five' family, such as Zheng Fen (挣分) and Mao-era Dou Dizhu (斗地主). Tichu is a brutally addictive four-player, partnership-based, traditional-ish card game.Ĭontrary to the game's quasi-Asiatic namesake (and the spurious origin stories in its very eccentric rulebook), Tichu is actually a Swiss game, conceived in 1991 by a German tabletop board game designer Urs Hostettler.

Tichu vs haggis