If this does not happen, points are scored according to how many 5s, 10s and Kings you won in tricks. Tichu is a trick-taking game, where the primary aim is to get rid of all your cards: if your team goes out first and second, you score big points.

Although I think an icon might still have been clearer than this idea. The designs do cunningly extend to the top-left corner (whichever way they are rotated), which means that when you hold a hand of cards (as in the picture later on), you can still tell the cards apart. They could put any design on the card, so it is needless to have two of them so similar.

Both are colourful swirling designs with a similar palette, and at first glance are not very distinct. My complaint with these cards is that the dragon and phoenix are too close in design. The four Tichu special cards, from left to right: Dragon, Phoenix, Hound, Mah Jong The four special cards in Tichu are the Mah Jong, Hound, Dragon and Phoenix: Needless to say, playing counter-clockwise is just pointlessly contrarian, so we abandon it in our group, and also just deal the cards out - I imagine many other groups do the same.) Special Cards (As an example of where Tichu ill-advisedly tries to break convention, the manual suggests that you get players to take one card at a time in turn from the deck, instead of dealing, and that you should play in a counter-clockwise order. They could have invented their own Chinese version, but here convention is more useful than innovative design. So they adopted the two.ten/jack/queen/king/ace system, which both introduces more visual flavour into the deck, but is also a convention that’s likely to be known to all players. But this would have left the deck feeling pretty plain and dull.

They could have simply numbered the cards 1–13. Here, the relation to playing cards is completely obvious. The highest ranks in Tichu: 10, Jack, Queen, King, Ace

Tichu game rules