Tichu FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

What’s New in Version 2.1?

The Matchmaker Update is all about making it easier for players to find human opponents in Cloud Matches.

Beginning with version 2.1, players can make themselves available to receive invitations to multiplayer matches from anyone, any time they are on-line in the game. The matchmaking system will then be able to invite them to join newly initiated multiplayer matches that have open seats. This should greatly reduce the chances that a player who wishes to play a multiplayer match will be stuck waiting around in an empty lobby because it vastly expands the pool of players who could be invited to play.

Only players who have set themselves to “allow invitations from strangers” can receive these invitations so if you would prefer to never be invited into a match with a player who is not on your friends list, simply don’t enable this setting.

There were also some minor bug fixes included in this release.

Exactly how does matchmaking work?

When you start a cloud match, you are first presented with a screen that lets you choose the type of opponent that you want to play with.

Each player’s seat (other than your own) is represented by a configuration button which allows you to choose what type of player you want to occupy that seat. Initially it will read “any player” which means that you don’t really care who might occupy that seat.

There is also a checkbox near the “Start Matchmaking” button which you can use to ask the matchmaker to give preferential treatment to players who have a similar skill level to your own. (Note this doesn’t mean that you won’t be matched with players with a wildly different skill level, it just means that you’re less likely to.)

You can click on any player button to change who you want to occupy that seat. You can choose to directly invite someone from your friends list into that seat. Or you can choose to only allow a Computer (AI) player to occupy that seat (and set its parameters accordingly). Or, of course, you can leave it set to the “any player” default, in which case you are requesting the matchmaker to attempt to find you a human opponent to fill that seat.

Once you have configured the type of match you want, you press the “Start Matchmaking” button and the matchmaker goes to work.

First the matchmaker will attempt to find existing matches that can accommodate your parameters. This means matches started by other players who are still open to new players, waiting in their own lobbies. If the matchmaker finds another match, it will add you to that match and you will join that player’s lobby.

If the matchmaker can’t find another match for you to join then it starts a new match for you and places you in the newly created match lobby.

Any player that you explicitly invited to join the match will be added to the match (you will see their name in the lobby) and an invitation to join your match will be sent to them, whether that player is on-line at the moment or not.

This is where the version 2.0 matchmaker stopped.

What follows is new behavior as of version 2.1.

If at this point there are still open seats in the match, then the matchmaker will select from the pool of on-line players who have said that they are open to receive match invitations from strangers. First it looks for players who have a similar skill (assuming you checked that box) and if there aren’t enough players at that skill level then it widens the search. If possible, one player is chosen for each open seat in your match. Each of these players then receives an invitation to join your match.

Note that only players who have explicitly opted to allow invitations from strangers and who are not currently actively playing a multiplayer match will receive invitations.

If one of these players chooses to accept the invitation, they will be brought into your game and assigned to an open seat. If they ignore (or dismiss) the invitation, nothing happens and you will not be told that they chose not to play with you. (We wouldn’t want people to feel bad about declining invitations. It’s perfectly OK to not be in the mood to play with a stranger.)

Every 30 seconds or so the matchmaker will send out a new batch of invitations to attempt to fill any remaining empty seats. This continues until either all seats are filled, or all players in the match have indicated that they are ready to start the match. (So when you are tired of waiting for new players, just check the Ready box. Once all human players have checked their Ready box the match starts.

If a player accepts an invitation after a match has started or after all the open seats have been filled, then that player will be told that the match is no longer available to join. So you generally have about 30 seconds to accept that invitation before you risk not being able to join the match.

What do I do if I never want to be invited into a stranger’s match?

Just go to your settings dialog and make sure you have not checked the box next to “Allow invitations from strangers” and the matchmaker will not invite you to join a stranger’s match.

What do I do if I never want a stranger to join my match?

Explicitly invite a player (or players) from your friends list to participate in your match. Then explicitly mark every other seat as occupied by an AI player. That marks each of those seats as occupied and tells the Matchmaker that you aren’t looking for a human opponent to occupy those seats.

Or you can just start your match before any other players have time to join.

What do I do if I receive an invitation from a stranger?

You can choose to join the match by clicking on the checkmark or you can choose to ignore the invitation by checking on the “x”.

If you accept the invitation you will be brought into the game’s lobby (assuming the game hasn’t already started or filled all its seats). If you are currently playing a single player game, don’t worry, your game will be saved and waiting for you to continue when you return.

If you decline the invitation, nothing happens. The players in that match will never know that you decided not to play with them at that time.

What happens if I leave a multiplayer cloud match in progress?

The match will continue without you until it requires that you make a decision. At that point the match will be stuck waiting until you return to take your next turn. The other players can still chat with one another but the game cannot progress without you. (Human players are never replaced with AI players once a cloud match has started.)

You can return to a cloud match in progress by choosing “Cloud Match” on the Multiplayer menu and selecting the match from the list of matches that you are participating in.

If all players leave the match then the match is saved on the servers until one of the players rejoins the match. At that point, other players involved in the match will receive a notification that the match is active again and players are waiting for you to rejoin.

This makes it easy to split cloud matches into multiple play sessions.

Why did you have to release Tichu 2? It’s so different!

I know. Change is hard and when one of your favorite apps changes in such a dramatic way it can be especially hard. I understand. I really do.

There are several reasons why a new version of Tichu needed to be released.

Multiplayer was completely broken. Over time, changes to the Apple ecosystem resulted in Tichu’s multiplayer support becoming unusable.
Some people couldn’t run the game at all. So much had changed in the iOS world that the game would crash and it had become completely unusable for some players.
There was a risk of the app going away completely. Apple periodically removes apps from the app store that haven’t been updated in a long while or that no longer function properly. Tichu was in real danger of being put on that list.
I had received many requests over the years to bring the game to other platforms. The old codebase was so closely tied to the iOS ecosystem that it had to be completely rewritten in order to make that happen.

Now Tichu is available on iOS, Android, Mac, and PC.

The User Interface is virtually the same on every platform.

The game works in both landscape mode (my favorite way to play) or portrait mode and, on systems that support it, can be resized to virtually any dimensions.

Your saved games can be accessed from any platform that you own the game. Play a few hands on your phone, then go home and play a few more on your PC.

Multiplayer works across all of the platforms with any player anywhere in the world.

And it’s not really so different as it might first appear!

The underlying game loop remains unchanged. The AI uses almost exactly the same code (only I fixed a few bugs and made a few minor improvements to it). Even the UI is mostly the same. It’s just been reskinned and presented in a manner that works better across a variety of systems.

And it will get better!

This is only a first step and I know it’s not perfect. Now that I have more time to work on the game, I plan to continue to iterate and improve. If you have suggestions, please email me at support@housefullofgames and let me know how I can make it better!

Then why didn’t you update it sooner?

Tichu was always a side project. There’s no way it could ever generate enough revenue to have been my full-time job.

Over the many, many years since I first released Tichu on iOS back in 2010, my professional life got increasingly busy. I was able to update the app a few times over the years but eventually I didn’t even have time for that.

Now my situation has changed dramatically. I’m largely retired from my old profession and now I have much more time to focus on the things that I want to do (such as keeping Tichu running for everyone).

Why was this version released as an update and not a new app?

I had two choices:

Release the new app as a free update for folks who bought the old app, fixing the problems of the old, aging app, but potentially upsetting many folks who wouldn’t like the new look and might be upset by the many changes.
Release the app as a new paid app (essentially a paid update) allowing anyone who wanted to continue with the old app to keep it and forcing anyone who wanted the new features and things like working cross platform multiplayer to pay for a new app.

I weighed the options and decided that the majority of people would appreciate a free upgrade. I felt that I owed something to people who had paid for an app that once supported multiplayer and now found themselves with one that didn’t.

If I were a greedy corporation, I probably would have opted for the second option.

Is there anything I can do to make it easier to play on my phone with one hand?

The new game needs to be able to run on a number of different screen sizes and the default setting of the controls may not match your preferred style of play.

The location of the play button can be configured in the settings dialog. Try changing that and see if it helps.

You may also want to enable double tap suggestions in the settings.

I think the game looks much better and is much more usable in landscape mode but I do understand why so many folks prefer to play in portrait mode and want to be able to play on their phones one handed.

The v2.0.47 update was specifically designed to address these issues. The player’s hand was pushed up a little higher on the screen when in portrait mode so it wouldn’t be quite as hard to reach (or see) the cards. Also, the buttons were relocated to sit above the player’s hand so that it could use the entire width of the screen if necessary. Hopefully this layout works better for you but feel free to let me know if it’s still a problem.

Are you sure the hands are properly shuffled?

Yes. I’m quite sure that they are properly shuffled.

The game uses the Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm, which ensures an even probability of any card being shuffled into any hand. Other algorithms can result in statistical aberrations which can result in some distributions being more likely than others. Fisher-Yates does not have this problem.

Care was also taken to ensure that the underlying random number generator is properly seeded and has as “random-like” a distribution as possible. No algorithmic random number generator is truly random, but this is as close as you can get without resulting to extreme measures (like this).

Could it be better? Of course. But not in any way that’s remotely practical for this purpose.

Then why do I keep seeing the same hands over and over?

The human brain is exceptional at recognizing patterns. We tend to see the same things over and over again. We focus on what is the same and ignore what is different.

Consider that after every deal, you are going to see a full 1/4 of the deck. Also consider that although those cards were technically dealt to you in a random order, the game automatically sorts them for you. You don’t see that randomness. All you see is an ascending (or descending) run of cards. Even the suits are ordered in the game. And on top of that, in most cases the suits don’t even matter so a pair of kings is a pair of kings no matter what suit they have.

It’s only natural that you will begin to see recurring patterns.

In addition, by exchanging three of your cards (more than 1/5 of your hand), your hand is going to tend to be affected in repeatable ways.

This is why when one player has a run, the likelihood is high that another will have a run as well. The same is true for full houses and bombs.

Be assured. The shuffle really is random.

What happened to my Stats!?

I had hoped to migrate all of the player’s statistics to the new app but unfortunately, while I WAS able to migrate all of your Achievements and your rating, ~~I was not able to find a way to migrate your statistics.~~

NEWS FLASH!

A way to recover your stats has been found!

As long as you haven’t uninstalled Tichu since you updated to version 2, your single-player stats will be migrated when you install version 2.0.49 (or later).

NOTE that not all stats will be migrated; only your personal stats. Stats pertaining to AI players will not be migrated as there is additional information being tracked there which doesn’t match cleanly to the old statistics.

Here is the list of player statistics that will be migrated over (in addition to rating and achievements which were already migrated):

Games Finished
Games Won (overall)
Hands Played
Hands Won
Bombs
Double Victories
Tichu Calls
Tichu Calls Succeeded
Grand Tichu Calls
Grand Tichu Calls Succeeded
Tichu Calls Spoiled
Most Tichu Calls Per Game
Most Grand Tichu Calls Per Game

NOTE: This migration will happen ONLY ONCE! So if you reset your statistics after they are migrated, they will be gone.

The new stats are stored in the cloud so uninstalling the game and then reinstalling it later (provided the stats have already been migrated over) will NOT erase them; which is different to what it would have done in the old game.

What is up with Double Tap?

The double tap play suggestion feature was missing in the initial release of version 2. But it returned in v2.0.47. You can enable it in the “Aids” tab of the Settings Dialog.

When the option is enabled, tapping (or clicking) the table twice in rapid succession triggers a play suggestion.

You should be careful not to rely too much on double tap. Many people mistake the double tap feature for a hint, which it most definitely is not. It’s really just a convenience feature which in most cases automatically selects the lowest (or most obvious) possible set of cards that could be played in a given situation. This is often a good play but there really is very little thought put into it at all and quite often it is NOT the best play.

I don’t like the default background color or card faces. Can I change them?

Yes!

There are SEVERAL different table styles, all easily configurable in the settings dialog. And if you have suggestions for more, please send them my way. They’re not difficult to add.

You can also change the card backs and faces. Some of the faces can be a bit hard to read on smaller devices but on a tablet or computer screen, a different deck style can really enhance the experience.

Does the game cheat?

NO! The game does not cheat. At no skill level does the AI know what cards you (or the other players) are holding in your hand.

The game DOES have a perfect memory of every card played during the hand. It also remembers which cards it passed. That means that once there are only two players left, all cards are known. Some may call that cheating. I call that skill. All good Tichu players track which cards have been played (at least the relevant ones).

But the game seems to bomb more than it should!

Nope. It’s perfectly random. There are no hijinks or shenanigans here.

Why do I keep having to press the pass button when I have nothing I can play?

The other players don’t know that you have nothing you can play. You might be holding a bomb. Do you really want the game to tip them off?

Of course the AI doesn’t peek into your hand and there’s not a real person there to tip off so if you don’t want to wait, you can check the “Automatically Pass” button in the “Aids” section of the Settings Dialog. That will eliminate the need to press the pass button in many situations, so long as you’re in a single player game.

The game will auto-pass regardless of the setting if you don’t hold enough cards to potentially play on the trick (when you hold fewer than 4 cards and need to play on a set made up of more than the number of cards you hold).

Why is there a 3 second countdown at the end of each trick?

This is to allow players time to bomb. You’ll notice that this countdown starts from 1 if you can’t possibly hold a bomb and it goes away entirely if all humans in the game are out of cards.

If you check the “No Out of Turn Bombs” setting in the “Game Play” section of the Settings Dialog then the countdown will never start at 3, since you’ve opted to play with this “house rule” and therefore can’t play a bomb out of turn.

Why do you need my name?

The name you enter (which doesn’t need to be your actual name) is used to generate an account on our cloud servers so we can store your saved games, statistics, and connect you to other players as friends or multiplayer opponents.

What kind of stuff are you storing in the cloud?

Nothing that directly identifies you in any way. We don’t know who you actually are, where you live, or anything like that. We don’t have your email or payment information or anything that could be considered sensitive. We don’t even track your ip address.

Here’s a complete list of what we track:

Your single player game.
The statistics that are shown in the game’s statistics screen.
Your achievements.
The (in-game) names of anyone you’ve added to your friends list.
Any multiplayer games you are currently involved in.
A token that uniquely, privately, and securely identifies your Game Center id, Google Play id, and/or Steam id (so we know it’s you).
(Note that these tokens are supplied by the respective services and don’t contain any personally identifiable information about you.)

That’s it.

How does Player Rating work?

Your rating is intended to be a rough indication of your skill level.

It’s essentially an Elo rating system.

When you complete a match, the average rating of your opponents is compared to the average rating of the players on your team and an expected score differential is computed based upon those ratings. If your actual score differential is better than the expected differential then your rating will be adjusted up. If your actual score differential is worse than the expected differential then your rating will be adjusted down.

There are a few other factors involved but that’s essentially how it works.

The implication is that if you play against higher rated opponents then your score can go up even if you lose and vice versa.

You really shouldn’t obsess over it.

Although I’ve taken some measures to prevent or discourage the most obvious ways of cheating the system (one example: don’t keep abandoning single player games or your rating will suffer), there are still plenty of ways that the system can be fooled into thinking that you’re playing better than you really are.

The system works best when you just play your game and you don’t really worry too much about it.

I have a suggestion (or a complaint, or a bug to report). What can I do?

Please email me at support@housefullofgames.com.

I am always open to constructive feedback, be it positive or negative.

Do you have a favorite feature that you miss from the old game?

Is something about the game bothering you?

Do you think you’ve found a bug? (I’m sure there are still some to discover.)

Is there some little thing that you think would make things better?

Just send me an email. I would love to discuss it with you.

NOTE: If you are reporting a gameplay issue, it would be helpful if you also included the game log that can be accessed from the Game Over screen (from v2.0.49 onward). I can use that log to reproduce the exact conditions that you are reporting and investigate the issue.

Can you localize the game into my language?

YES! I would LOVE to do that!

But I need your help.

Localization is EXPENSIVE, particularly when the game contains a section that describes the complete rules of play.

If you would like to help localize the game into your language, please reach out to me (support@housefullofgames.com) and I will be more than happy to send you a set of files and instructions so you can work with me to make it happen.

My friends and I run a review site. Will you send me a Steam key (or free game)?

Probably not.

How do I know that you’re not just some young punk who is too cheap to fork out $5 for a new game? I’m not here to help you build out your collection of free games.

If you truly are a reputable reviewer from a reputable review site, chances are your organization has enough budget to cough up $5.

But if you truly are a legitimate reviewer from a well established organization then I guess it never hurts to ask.

Because who doesn't want a house full of fun things?