Congratulations, Sean, on getting your game published.  It’s particularly pleasing to see because I’ve been aware of this design through most of its gestation process.  To quote the Dead, what a long, strange trip it’s been.

For me, it began four and a half years ago, when I saw a posting by Sean on the Geek asking if anyone had designed a two-player version of Tichu.  I had never corresponded with Sean before, but it seemed like an interesting challenge, so I whipped something together (which I dubbed “Teech for Two") and gave it a successful playtest.  However, my game had much more in common with David Parlett’s The Bum Game (another climbing game), a deliberate choice, as I much prefer that game to Tichu.  I wrote up the rules and they were the subject of one of my earliest articles for BGN.  I also sent them to Sean to see what he thought.  He liked some of the ideas, but he was really looking for something closer to Tichu.  In particular, he wanted to see bombs!

Anyway, Sean and I started corresponding on ways of changing my design.  At some point, his ideas became so numerous that I think he just decided to start from scratch and create his own game.  The result, Haggis, was much more like Tichu and had little in common with Teech for Two.  There were still many details to work out, however, and Sean wrote me from time to time to fill me in on the design changes and why they were incorporated.  It was a fascinating picture of a game in progress.

So I feel a bit like a proud uncle who has watched a child grow from a toddler to a responsible adult (I refer to Haggis, of course, not Sean!).  Converting a great (and well known) partnership game like Tichu into a absorbing two-player experience is a difficult task, but I think Sean has pulled it off.  I hope the game has a lot of success and that plenty of Tichu lovers find they can still satisfy their craving when but a single opponent is available.

Thank you, Larry, for the kind words and for all your help over the past few years. While Haggis has gone through many changes since it’s beginning as a variant of Teech, I am still indebted to you for several of the foundational ideas that remain. In particular, the equally distributed wild cards, though now different in their application, was a pivotal element whose credit must be yours. Also, though I did not always listen until several others said the same thing, your continued recommendations to simplify have helped lead to the much less complicated solution that we see today. Cheers!