Tichu

First a real quick introduction for those of you that don't play Tichu.  It's a card game with 52 cards very much like playing cards plus four special cards. The general principle is similar to Scum aka President where the object is to get rid of your cards before anyone else by laying higher ranking cards on the current cards being played. You can play single cards or sets of cards like Scum but you score somewhat like Rook. For those of you that haven't played Tichu, I highly recommend it. Our children brought it home from Goshen College.

So tonight was our third Thursday night playing with our two renters that are Goshen College seniors, one of whom is Lois' nephew Ted. The other is Lucas Nafziger - no relation to me.  In Tichu you play with set partners so Lois and I have been playing against them.  Even if you know nothing about Tichu you will appreciate the rarity of Lois starting the first two rounds having all four Ace's in each round and in the final round I had all four Ace's! But in between Ted had two sequence bombs and Lucas had consecutive King bombs.

The game ends when either team scores 1000 points.  We started off by my being set (down 100) then we surged to a 550 to 50 lead but near the end they managed claw back to an 850 to 750 lead.  Then I Grand Tichued (basically double bet I was going to go out first) and made it plus got all the points so we won 1050 to 850.  Overall we've won 2 of our 3 games.  If we keep beating them I think we'll still have them coming back for more because we always feed them something.  Actually it's very unlikely we'll continue to win. They are both good players.

This is the first we've ever had so much fun with renters.