Partnership climbing card game -- object is rid yourself of your hand. The deck is a standard 52-card pack with four special cards added. When it's your turn, you may either beat the current top card combination or pass. If play passes all the way back to the player who laid the top cards, he wins the trick and can lead the next one. The card led determines the only combination of cards to be played on that trick. So if a single card is led, then only single cards are played. If a straight of seven cards is led, then only straights of seven cards, etc. The last player out gives all the cards he won to the player who exited first, and the last player's unplayed cards are handed to the opposite team. Fives, Tens and Kings are worth points, with each hand worth one hundred points (without bonuses). The first team to 1000 points wins.
History
Tichu belongs to a family of Chinese card games referred to as "climbing games" by John McLeod. It is an evolution of Zheng Fen ("competing for points"). Tichu shares Zheng Fen's set of scoring cards (Kings, Tens, and Fives) and a subset of Zheng Fen's playable combinations. In Zheng Fen the primary goal is to capture scoring cards during trick play. Tichu shares this goal but introduces partnership play and newer/overriding goals which focus primarily on emptying your hand of cards before the opposing team members. 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.
Important note: while the rules include variations to provide for 3, 5 or 6 players, fans of the game virtually unanimously believe it should only be played with exactly 4.
These tables provide a historic view of outcomes of Tichu games played on BSW where the intermediate scores of all logged games (~650,000 games) were recorded. For each occurring score pair, the historic eventual win rate from that score is computed and presented in the table.
There are four tables provided, for four different levels of minimum occurrences of each score pairing. Color coded to make viewing easier. And sheets with the raw data as well. This format is a little tricky to read at first. The row values show the score of the currently winning team. The column values show the score of the currently losing team. But not all possible values of the losing team are explicitly shown. Rather, since the score always adds up to a multiple of 100, the columns only represent the...
2.5"x3.5" rules refresher "Cheat Sheet"
This is a card-sized (standard MtG CCG) "cheat sheet" with the key rules for the game. This card is meant for people familiar with the game but wants a quick refresher, especially about picky details that are easy to forget. Feel free to comment/critique for me to improve them.
To be honest, the Matthew Fredrick player aid works pretty good scaled down to 2.5"x3.5"...
Tichu Spielerhilfe auf Deutsch, basierend auf der englischen Spielerhilfe von mfrederick. Format DIN A4, ein Blatt = 4 Spielerhilfen. Passen ausgeschnitten in die Abacus-Tichubox.
Deutsche Übersetzung von Clawf1ng3r.
Spreadsheet showing the historical rate of receiving 0, 1, 2 or 3 of each card (2-A) in the pass, given how many you were dealt. Mined from all bsw games.
Unlike last spreadsheet, it's just a static table, so should be completely self-explanatory.
What can we learn from 9 million real hands of Tichu? It turns out quite a lot. This file provides a pivot table which gives a view into 800 combinations of starting 8 cards and tells you how often people call grand with each combination, and how often they succeed. Discussed here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/3213030. Please keep the discussion there.
But I should mention, as a quick instruction guide, that to use the pivot table, you simply click the plus/minus buttons to construct the starting hand you're interested in. You can drill down as little or as much as you want. If you don't drill down all the way to specify every field in the pivot, the fields not specified are simply rolled up (still independent). You can also reorder or take fields out of the pivot (or add dog...
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