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Alec Chapman
United Kingdom
South London
3m3.posterous.com - a "lovely bunch of wafflers"
The 10:100 system is not a personal attack on you!
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I am combining the two trick taking ladder games here, as one is so derivative of the other. Since the three player option in Tichu is awful (as are all the other versions apart from 4 player) the additional player numbers options created by Haggis are ideal.
Tichu (and its derivative, Haggis) are sort of like Bridge, in that partners attempt to win together, and it is based around tricks.
OK, that's nonsense. They're not much like Bridge. I just say that to trick my parents into playing. Instead of playing one card at a time you can lead any of a multitude of combinations (full house, three of a kind etc) and your opponents not only have to play something higher (the ladder part) but also the same combination.
e.g. the player who has the lead plays 2,2 – the next player must play a higher pair or pass.
Once everyone has passed the player who played the highest card or combination wins the trick. In both games you try to be the first player to play all the cards in your hand.
The differences between Tichu and Haggis seem subtle, but they are sufficient to mean skill at one is no guarantee of success at the other. The special cards in Tichu give specific abilities and are held in secret. The wild cards (which double as bombs) in Haggis are public and it seems, from my very limited experience so far, that good play of these is crucial, even more so that good Dragon / Dog / Phoenix play in Tichu.
The problem with hitting 100 plays of either is that the points scoring systems require many hands to be played, so I have to be careful to log sessions and so on very carefully to not cheat my own system. I guess the thing to do is to log each discrete game of each (so this entry will be worth 200 plays) where it has been completed – the trick is that I have to resist any attempt to end the game early, and therefore I can feel justified in logging per session.
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