Dale Yu: Three-chu, Thanksgiving-con Revue and Tippecanoe too!

It was a fantastic holiday weekend at Chez Yu with family and friends over for lots of good food and a bit of gaming.  I got a chance to get through most of the rest of the Essen crop as well as play my new favorite game a few more times. (Betcha can’t guess which game that is!) I managed to get in 25 games during the weekend!

“Three-Chu”

Have you ever been sitting around with three people wishing that you could just find a fourth so you could play Tichu?  This has happened to me more times than I care to count.  Apparently it had also happened to Valerie Putman and James Miller, and we tried out an idea this weekend: a three-player version of Tichu.  The game is similar to Three-Handed Bridge where there is a dummy hand on the board.  The rules were still being ironed out while we played the game, but here’s the most recent version of the Three-Chu rules. 

Three-Chu rules (version 1.0)

Three-Chu is a three-handed variant of Tichu.  The players in the game will take turns playing with a “dummy” partner, which is a hand dealt to the table (and placed between two of the players).  The two players not playing with the Dummy Hand form the other partnership.  At the end of each hand, scores are calculated and awarded to the individual players.  Afterwards, the Dummy Hand rotates clockwise to the next space between players and the partnerships change accordingly.

All rules of Tichu apply unless otherwise changed below.

Deal – The player who is partnered with the dummy (aka “The Single Player”) deals the hand.  Deal out the cards to the players as usual.  The three players still have the option to call Grand Tichu.  No one may look at the cards dealt to the dummy hand during the deal.

Passing - The three players pass one card to each other player.  No cards are passed to or from the dummy hand.  Once the cards are passed amongst the players, the Single Player may look at the cards in the Dummy Hand.  Note that the Single Player may look at the dummy hand before the first card is played.

Starting the hand and revealing the Dummy hand - The hand is led by the hand which holds the “1” card.  Once the first card is played, the Dummy Hand is revealed and placed face-up on the table.  The cards may be arranged in any way that the Single Player wishes.

Playing the hand - The hand is played in the usual fashion with the exception that the Single Player makes all decisions for the Dummy Hand.  The Single Player may call Tichu for the Dummy Hand as long as no cards have yet been played from that hand. In order to limit confusion, the Single Player should try to always make clear when he is playing or passing with the Dummy Hand (i.e. saying “Dummy Hand passes” instead of “pass”).  Any tricks won by the dummy are placed face-down next to the Dummy Hand.

Scoring - At the conclusion of the hand, scoring is calculated as usual.  The scorekeeper should keep individual scores for each player.  The two partnered players will each score the number of points that their partnership garnered in the hand, and the Single Player will score the number of points that he and the Dummy Hand won.

Game End - Currently there are two different methods to end the game.  The players in the game should decide which method they will use before the start of the game. 

Option 1: Equal Number of Hands – In this option, the players agree beforehand on a number of hands to be played.  Each player should have the same number of hands as the Single Player.  At the end of the proscribed number of hands, the player with the most points wins the game. 

Option 2: First to Target Score – This option is more like the traditional Tichu game end; the players agree to a target score, usually 1,000 points.  The game ends whenever at least one player has exceeded the target score.  The player with the highest score at that time wins the game.

/end rules

So we’ve played only one game so far, and we were working out the kinks in the rules on the fly.  However, it was quite an enjoyable game, and it had much of the tension and strategy that you’d expect in a regular game of Tichu.  We all agreed that it may actually be a bit more “thinky” than regular Tichu because you get to make decisions for two hands when you’re the Single Player.  Additionally, it was nice to be able to know that your partner would often be able to lead exactly what you needed!

In fact, for me, it hit a particular sweet spot as I liked having the challenge of looking at the Dummy Hand and planning out my play from both sides.  That aspect of the game is what I love about playing Bridge, but it’s hard to find two or three others around me who know how to play Bridge and like to do so. 

The strategy also changes quite a bit due to the Dummy Hand.  First, if the player to the right of the Dummy Hand has the Wish, you have to make your wish blindly because you will not know anything about the contents of the Dummy Hand (as no cards are passed to the Dummy Hand).  There is a much higher chance that you could inadvertently pull something out of your partner’s hand as a result. 

Furthermore, since the Dummy Hand is face-up for all players to see, the simple knowledge of what could be played over you can affect how you play the game.  We played one hand where the Dummy Hand was dealt a bomb of 6s.  Valerie and I had a hard time deciding what to play knowing that James (who was the Single Player) had called Tichu and that he had a bomb at his disposal to play at any time!

As far as the game ending conditions go, we were still undecided as to the best way to end the game.  I was alone in thinking that the game should still be played to a target score.  I feel that a lot of the excitement in Tichu is when the scoring causes you to consider calling Tichu or Grand Tichu with a suboptimal hand in order to quickly make up points.  By keeping the target score end-game option, I felt that the players would always know where they stood score-wise to make their Tichu decisions.

Valerie and James both felt that an equal number of rounds was a better option as they felt it was more important to give each player an equal number of chances to score points on their own in order to separate themselves from the other two players.  The downside of this is that the end-game could possibly be anti-climactic if someone had already pulled far ahead or it could allow for some meta-gaming where one player might possibly throw the result of a given hand knowing how many hands were left in the game.

Both options have their advantages and disadvantages, and I haven’t played enough Three-Chu to even start to know which might be better.  Regardless of which option is chosen, I think the game will work just fine as long as all players agree to one option or the other before the game starts.  In the final analysis, I don’t think that this would ever surpass the regular four-player Partnership Tichu game, but Three-Chu is certainly a good game in its own right.  The addition of Dummy Hand play to Tichu may cause this game to stand out on its own as it is quite more complex IMHO.

Thanksgiving-con Revue

As I mentioned earlier, I was able to play a few more of the games from the Essen crop for the first time this weekend. 

NiShiKi Deluxe

Ni-Shi-Ki Deluxe is one of the other Japanese games that I brought back from Essen.  It is advertised as “Sliding Japanese Chess”.  The board is a framework for plastic pieces which can slide around (think of one of those 15 puzzles).  Each plastic sled holds one card which represents a different military unit. 

The basic game starts you with spearmen and cavalry cards.  They are placed on the board in a proscribed manner with each side having identical pieces.  Each card has a military strength value on each of its four sides which gives a better representation of the actual military units.  For example, a horseman card has a value of 4 from the front, but only 1 in the rear.

On your turn, you roll a d6 which tells you how many action points you have each turn.  An action point can be used to load up a sled with a card or to slide a sled in any direction (which may in turn push other sleds around if there is room for them to move).  After your points are expended, you may battle once.  Initially the pieces can only melee battle which means they can only attack opposing cards that are adjacent to them, but later in the game you can introduce other cards such as archers which have ranged attacks as well.

Battle is fairly simple.  Each card starts with a battle value which is printed on the side of the card which is adjacent to the enemy.  In addition to this, each player rolls a d6 to get a final value.  The card with a higher sum wins the battle and captures the opposing card.  That card is removed from the board and “taken prisoner”.  Later in the game, three prisoner cards can be traded in for a Ronin card ,which is basically a better military unit.

The game continues until one player is able to successfully attack the opponent’s “castle” or rearmost space three times.  Though getting a unit to the castle can be a difficult task, the castle actually has little defense as it only rolls a d6 while the attacking unit still gets to roll a d6 and ADD it to the number printed on the side of the card.  Admittedly, the use of the d6 introduces a fair amount of luck into the game, but there is still a lot of strategy to be had in figuring out how to push the sleds around to get your cards where you want them to go.  I will admit though that it is frustrating to see your great strategy be blown out of the water because you keep rolling 1s and 2s.  Perhaps an averaging die might make this more palatable for me, but I haven’t played it enough to start thinking about tinkering with the rules yet.

What I have described above is the basic game.  There are also a number of other different games/scenarios that you can play with the Ni-Shi-Ki set.  The Ronin cards which I mentioned above also each represent a general or daimyo from the past.  Each of those cards has a special ability.  There are a number of historical battles that are setup in the rules where players can try to re-enact great battles from the Japanese feudal period.  The special abilities of the particular daimyos, as well as the different troop cards available at the start, are supposed to reflect on the different strengths of the armies involved. 

The game was enjoyable enough, but it’s still too much of a direct conflict game for me to really get into that much.  I’d be happy to play it again, but I’m not sure if I’ll find a willing opponent in my local group.  As such, I may let this one go as I don’t think it’ll get played much at my house—see below for more details.

Cuba

I think I’ve already gone over my opinion of Cuba in a previous column, but the short review would be “Solid game, but nothing spectacularly new”.  John Palagyi brought over his brand spanking new English copy and we quickly got it out to the table.  Again, I had to pull out the rulebook and make sure that I hadn’t misread the rule about all the buildings being available at the beginning of the game.

The game we had was highly influenced by one building tile: the one which has a picture of a choice of good followed by a 2x arrow pointing at a ship.  We pretty much had no idea how to interpret the action of that tile as the iconography doesn’t even come close to matching the text translation on the back of the tile.  I wish I could put that text here, but I don’t own the game, so you’ll have to find your own copy.  In any event, we went with a ruling that followed the text printed on the backside of the building tile more than the iconography.  However, given the fact that I started to score about 10 points a turn as a result of that tile, I’m fairly certain that we interpreted it wrong.  Valerie did mention that Jay from Rio Grande had similar questions about this tile and that he was trying to get a confirmation of the tile’s abilities via email from Eggertspiele. 

I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole Parliament rule mechanism.  I like the fact that the different rules and the timing in which they come up (and are passed) makes for a different game each time out.  However, I find that the voting was often non-confrontational as it was far too painful to lose your money and get no say in the law passing if you lost the vote count.  Perhaps our table was just full of conservative players, and we weren’t aggressive enough about trying to pay for votes—or maybe the card combinations that came up didn’t lead to enough of a change to make it worth the money.  I’ll try it at least once more as this part of the game did pique my interest.

Power and Weakness

Power and Weakness is the new two-player game from JKLM.  It pits the two sides (in garish orange and white colors) fighting for control of an island of Great Britain.  The hook in this game is that there are two separate phases in the game.  There is a knight phase where your cubes are the active pieces, and there is a wizard phase where your discs are the active pieces.

As an additional brain burning concept, each phase has its own idea of adjacency.  In the knight phase, sections of the board are adjacent in the traditional manner: if they touch on the game board.  In the wizard phase, you have to refer to region markers which are randomly placed in the areas.  Regions which share the same type of region markers are adjacent in the wizard phase.

On your turn, you can choose between a number of actions: placing a piece to the board, drawing an action tile, playing action tiles or adding inactive pieces from the stock to your supply (to be played in later actions).  The goal of all your actions is to take control of the different regions on the board.  At the end of each phase, you look at the board and figure out which player controls more regions.  That player gets one point on the scoreboard.  Then you check whether or not someone has won the game.  To do this, you add the points on the scoreboard to the number of regions which are being actively controlled (those regions which have more pieces of the active type in them than inactive type).  If this is 12 or greater, the game ends.

The game presents a number of interesting decisions to the players.  Similar to El Grande or El Cabellero, there is a certain amount of timing in deciding when to spend an action to get pieces into your supply for use in later turns.  Additionally, given the rotating nature of the phases, you often are taking actions that cannot be used immediately.  When you add pieces to your supply, you can take only inactive pieces—therefore, you wouldn’t be able to use them in the current phase.  Furthermore, when you draw a tile, you can keep it in your hand and play it later.  This allows you to postpone your actions for a later time when you can better take advantage of them.

The first game that we played was a bit stunted as it took both of us a few phases to figure out what we wanted to do.  Unfortunately, due to our inexperience with the game, we had placed our pieces poorly and neither player was not really in a good position to attack the other.  As a result, the game limped to an unexciting finish, but I definitely have some ideas on how I would better play my pieces to the board in the next game and what tiles I’d like to have in my hand.  Despite the awkward game, I remain quite interested in this game and look forward to getting another chance to play it again soon to try out the new strategies that I’ve formed in my head.

CRAZY DALE’S ESSEN GAME BAZAAR

Ni-Shi-Ki Deluxe

Well, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not sure that Ni-Shi-Ki Deluxe will get much play here.  As such, I will add this one to the games I’m offering up in the Game Bazaar.  MSRP is 80 Euro, so it can be yours for $110.  I’m open to some trade offers too.  Just let me know.

Antler Island

Still have an Antler Island available… $70 ($87.50 at MOBRTMBLIAO*)

Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor

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