Larry Levy: Teech for Two

When Rick asked me if I wanted to write a weekly column for Boardgame News, he told me I could include anything I wanted.  So this week, you lucky people, you’re getting a game!  It’s a design of my own called Teech for Two and the short description is a two-player version of Tichu.  But that’s not entirely accurate and to explain what it actually is will require some background.

Tichu is quite the gaming phenomenon.  Designed by Urs Hostettler (best known as the designer of Kremlin), it debuted in 1991.  It was well regarded enough to finish third in that year’s “a la carteâ€? Best Card Game awards, but it really didn’t take off until a few years after its re-release by Abacus in 1998.  As the twenty-first century dawned, suddenly it seemed as if the gaming world had gone Tichu mad.  That fanatical devotion continues to this day, as just about every game convention features those foursomes who play Tichu until the wee hours of the morning.

While I’ll certainly play the game if asked, I’m pretty much immune to Tichu Fever.  One reason is all the fiddly rules; Tichu veterans take all the exceptions and special cases in stride, but they still trip me up from time to time, particularly since I don’t play that often.  Moreover, if I get three other good gamers in a room with 90 minutes to spare, there are plenty of other games I’d rather play than Tichu.  But the real reason I’m not a true fanboy is two other games.  The first is Bridge.  Although I learned the game relatively late in life, it was a major focus of mine for a decade.  I dabbled a bit in tournament play, had many more marathon rubber game sessions, and played at lunch almost every day at work for five years or so.  Not surprisingly, when I think about partnership card games, it’s Bridge that comes to mind, not Tichu.

The other game is The Bum Game, which I’ve written about before.  Like Tichu, this is a climbing game (i.e., a player puts down a set of cards and each player in turn must either play a similar, but higher ranking set, or pass).  Their similarity is no accident, as both are derived from the same traditional Chinese game, Zheng Shàng Yóu.  Actually, they come from different branches of the same gaming family:  Tichu comes from the branch where you score for cards taken in tricks, while in The Bum Game (as well as The Great Dalmuti), the only thing that matters is how quickly you go out.  (Days of Wonder’s Gang of Four comes from yet a third branch, where everyone scores for the number of cards left in their hand when someone goes out and the lowest score wins.)

Although it has been played in China for many decades, the first English language description of Zheng Shàng Yóu appeared in 1980.  David Parlett (of Hare & Tortoise fame) presented his version of the game (which he dubbed “The Bum Gameâ€?) about a decade later.  It sounded intriguing, so I tried it out at work in 1998.  It was an instant hit and we played literally every day at lunch for over a year.  In addition to the changing of roles during the game (in which the winner of a hand gains a benefit in the next hand), we all found the card play to be very challenging.  In fact, I find I much prefer it to Tichu’s card play (although Tichu has other aspects that are missing from The Bum Game).  The greater number of wild cards in The Bum Game, along with the fact that sequences can be only three cards long means that there are many more ways to play a hand than in Tichu.  I find this more than compensates for the lack of bombs, Tichus, dragons, and partnership play.  It’s just a personal preference (and obviously not a typical one), but The Bum Game is my climbing game of choice, not the far more popular Tichu.

Anyway, back in October of last year, a gamer named Sean Ross posed a question on the Geek:  did anyone have any experience with a two-player climbing game?  He was interested in either existing games or newly invented ones.  I had never heard of such a thing, and I could see why they might not work at all, but it also seemed like a fun challenge, so I started thinking about how such a game would work.  My first few lines of reasoning turned out to be dead ends.  But when I started to consider what attributes I wanted this game to have, I kept coming back to The Bum Game.  Back when we were playing it, we had come up with three and five player versions of the basic game, both of which worked quite well.  Could a two-player version also succeed?  I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t take too long to tailor the basic game to two.  I posted my variant at that time, but I didn’t have the opportunity to playtest it until a couple of weeks ago.  Happily, the game turned out to be quite enjoyable.  So without further ado, here is my two-player version of The Bum Game, which I’ve dubbed, Teech for Two.

TEECH FOR TWO

Number of Players: 2

Playing Time: 30 minutes

Components: A 36 card deck.  Take an ordinary deck of cards, remove all the Clubs (except for the 2 of Clubs), the threes, and the fours.  Add the two Jokers.  You’re left with the ranks of 5 through Ace with three cards apiece, four deuces, and two Jokers.

Rank of the Cards: 5 (low), 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King, Ace, 2, Joker.  In addition, under some circumstances, the twos and Jokers are wild.  The card suits are irrelevant.

Objective: Teech for Two is played in a series of hands.  The object in each hand is to get rid of your cards before your opponent.  This earns the player a point.  The first player to get three points wins the game.

Setup: Select one player to be dealer.  He takes out the four deuces and gives two to each player.  He also takes out the two Jokers and gives one to each player.  He then shuffles the remaining 30 cards and deals 12 to each player.  The last six cards are put out of play without looking at them.  Each player’s hand consists of the 12 dealt cards, plus the three wild cards.

Gameplay: Each hand consists of a number of tricks.  The non-dealer leads to the first trick by playing a card combination.  A card combination may be either a set or a sequence.

A set is a group of cards of the same rank, which may include wild cards.  Sets may consist of one to six cards.  Here are some examples of sets:

* 7 (one seven);
* 5-Joker (two fives);
* Q-Q-Q (three Queens);
* 8-8-2-Joker (four Eights);
* 2-2-Joker (three Twos).

As the foregoing shows, a Two can be used to replace any card in a set except a Joker and Jokers can be used to replace any other card in a set.

A sequence is a group of cards in consecutive order, regardless of suit.  The sequence must contain at least three cards.  Wild cards cannot replace a card in a sequence, but can be used in a sequence if their natural order is used.  Here are some examples of sequences:

* 9-10-J (a three card sequence);
* 5-6-7-8-9 (a five card sequence);
* K-A-2-Joker (a four card sequence).

After a combination of cards is led, the other player has the option of playing a higher ranking combination or passing.  In order to be higher ranking, the new combination must be of the exact same type, have the exact same number of cards, and have higher ranking cards.  For example, if a single 7 is led, the other player could play any single card of rank 8 or higher (including a 2 or a Joker).  He could not play a pair, regardless of rank.  Pairs must be played in response to pairs, triplets in response to triplets, and so on.  Similarly, if the lead is the 6-7-8-9 sequence, the next player would have to play a four card sequence (no more, no less) headed by at least a 10.

If a player responds with a higher ranking combination, the option to play or pass reverts to her opponent.  This can continue several times, until one player passes.  Once a player passes, the other player, who played the highest combination, is the winner of the trick.  The cards played to the trick are discarded, since they have no bearing on the rest of the game.  The winner of the trick then leads to the next trick.

When a player plays the last card in her hand, the hand is over.  The winner of the hand scores a point.  Another hand is then dealt (don’t forget to include the six cards put out of play at the beginning of the hand).  The dealer is the leader in points (so that the trailing player gets the first lead).  If both players have the same number of points, the winner of the last hand deals.

Continue until a player scores their third point.  This player is the winner of the game.

Variant: For a longer game, you can play to five points.

My friend and I played two games.  He won three straight hands in the first one; the second was closer, with him winning the fifth game to edge me 3-2.  The game played quickly, but the decisions were still interesting and significant.  Often, a post-mortem revealed that a different line of play from the loser would have changed the result and that the losing player could have deduced that this was the choice most likely to succeed.

The game really hews pretty closely to the basic Bum Game.  My design contributions were deciding on a card mix, having the wild cards be equally distributed rather than dealt randomly, and determining how many cards should go undealt.  With six cards set aside each hand, there is uncertainty of what your opponent’s hand looks like, but there’s still enough information available to guess at what cards he probably holds.  My original design allowed the players to play double and triple sequences, but none of those came up in our game and they would probably be too powerful for the player fortunate enough to get one, so I took the option out.

Anyway, that’s the game.  We both liked it and found it scratched the same hand management itch that other climbing games do.  If any other brave souls actually want to try this out, I’d love to hear what they thought of the game, either as a comment on this site or as a private email.  Any thoughts on possible modifications are welcome as well.

New Games Played

Hacienda

Yes, I know it seems like reporting on this game has become a weekly ritual, but I keep finding folks who haven’t played the game who want to give it a try.  This time, I invoked Iron Will and insisted that we use the first variant outlined in the rules.  The other three players readily agreed.  Well, I should know better than to doubt the word of Mike Fitzgerald on something like this.  He’s absolutely correct:  the game plays much better with the variant.  With the original rules, long land chains are clearly the way to go, since they score well and also provide mucho pesos when you connect to markets.  With the variant, though, in order to get the big bucks, you need large herds.  Moreover, animal tiles are now worth VPs.  Not surprisingly, there is a much greater demand on the Animal cards with this new version.  This makes for a much more balanced game with regard to the land and animal decks.  The game also moves quicker (since the game ends when the animal deck is exhausted) and doesn’t outstay its welcome.  Land is still important for earning money and setting yourself up to take advantage of the “money earnedâ€? equation is a nice challenge.  Sadly, there still wasn’t much defense played in our game, but it was obvious after the fact that a couple of well placed blocking tiles could have made a dramatic difference on the outcome.  With experience, I think players will be far more likely to play defense when necessary.  Overall, I was very pleased with the new way of playing the game and this was easily the best of the four-player games of this I’ve played.  My only real complaint is that the game was almost too fast, as the game didn’t even last long enough for the players to buy any water tiles.  Again, I think that with experience, players will gauge the time factor better and recognize the ramifications of their animal card purchases.  I fully intend to play all my other games of Hacienda with the first variant (the second variant still seems very unnecessary to me).  I’ve now picked my rating for the game back up to 8 and consider it my third favorite design of 2005 (although I still have a lot of other Essen games to try out).

The Hollywood Card Game

This is set-collecting Tinseltown style, with Messrs. Faidutti and Schacht serving as our star-struck tour guides.  There are two types of cards in the game:  film cards (in three varieties) and star cards (rated 1, 2, or 3).  The object is to complete movies.  In each round, 14 cards are dealt out, in four columns of 4, 4, 3, and 3 cards.  Players take turns placing their tokens at the bottom of a column.  If there is already a token there, it gets pushed up to the next highest card (any other tokens in the column are pushed up as well).  When 12 tokens have been placed, each player takes the cards his tokens are on in a specified order.  Film cards are placed with the other film cards you’ve collected of that kind (so you can have up to three movies being filmed at the same time).  A star card must be immediately placed on a stack of film cards, which completes that movie.  Any other film cards of that type that you subsequently collect begin a new pile.  There’s a little bit more to it than that, but that’s the basics.  At the end of the game, each movie is worth the number of film cards multiplied by the star card’s rating.

It’s interesting that perfect information games like this can obviously be played very thoughtfully, in an “if I do this, she’ll do thatâ€? kind of way, but our group usually plays them pretty fast and loose.  Martin Wallace’s La Strada is another example of that kind of thing.  I wonder if the loss of control due to these being multiplayer games contributes to this.  For example, Combit, a fine two-player game by Horst-Rainer Rösner and Klaus Palesch with somewhat similar mechanics, always plays out very carefully, with lots of thought behind each play.  But with the multiplayer games, it’s as if the players know they don’t truly control their own destiny, so rather than work too hard on figuring the possibilities, they keep the game moving along and play more or less by intuition.  It’s also possible the light theme might hurt this a bit as well, as it seems to make the game feel less “seriousâ€?.  (Combit, on the other hand, is conspicuously themeless.) The final reason may be that The Hollywood Card Game is obviously intended as a filler, and while we like our fillers to have some thought involved, we really don’t want to spend too much time plotting out our moves (if we did, it wouldn’t be a filler anymore, would it?).  Anyway, this is light and pleasant, but didn’t really grab me.  I rate it a 6.5, since even though I have no real desire to play it again, I recognize the game could be played in a more serious fashion than we did.

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