Tichu, Sobek, Lucky Numbers, and Catan Get Revamped

• Urs Hostettler's climbing card game Tichu has been in print continually since 1991, and while you don't need a specialized deck to play — Jon from JonGetsGames and I taught two new players during GAMA Expo 2020 on a regular 52-card deck with four marked-up jokers — having a specialized deck does make the game more enjoyable. While the Fata Morgana/ABACUSSPIELE box has been standard for more than two decades, other versions do exist, such as the snazzy red-and-gold packaging from Filosofia in 2014 and a more naturalistic-looking deck from uplay.it edizioni, also in 2014.

Now French publisher TIKI Editions has announced a new edition for release in March/April 2021, with art by Christine Alcouffe.

• TIKI Editions also released a new edition of Michael Schacht's Lucky Numbers in France in September 2020, with an English-language version due out by the end of 2020. The game first appeared in 2012 from Ravensburger.

In this game, you have a 4x4 grid, with a set of tiles numbered 1-20 in the face-down pool for each player in the game. You start with four tiles face up on your board from upper left to lower right. On a turn, you take a face-up tile that's been previously discarded or a face-down tile, then either add that tile to your board, replace a tile on your board (discarding the old one), or discard it. All tiles in rows and columns must go from low to high as you go from, respectively left to right and top to bottom. Fill your 4x4 board first to win.

Lucky Numbers sounds like a luckfest, but I'm 18-7 in my games on Board Game Arena, so I'll pretend otherwise.

• Designer Bruno Cathala has announced that a new version of Sobek, first released in 2010 by GameWorks, will hit the market in 2021. This new version will be for two players only, unlike the original game for 2-4 players, which makes me think that the game will re-appear on the market from Space Cowboys, which brought GameWorks' 2009 title Jaipur back to print in 2020. We'll see...

• In November 2020, Catan Studio released a print-and-play version of Catan titled Catan: First Adventure, with this design from Klaus and Benjamin Teuber apparently being an English-language version of 2019's Catan Junior Mitbringspiel.

You can download rules and game materials here, and here's an overview of how to play:

Quote:

The kids on Catan are adventurous, learning to sail at a young age and wanting to spend their time sailing around the small offshore islands and playing exciting games. Today, you are playing pirates and want to build camps and a fort faster than anyone else.

In Catan: First Adventure, you start with a pirate camp that sits across two of the islands in the larger ring of islands. Each island depicts a resource, and you start with one of each of the resources showing on the islands under your camp.

On a turn, you first roll the six-sided die. On a result of 1-5, all players take a resource from the reserve if they have a camp on an island with a matching number; on a result of 6, you move the Ghost Captain to an island of your choice, taking two of the resource depicted there. No one else can claim resources from this island as long as the Ghost Captain remains there.

You then move the single ship on its course clockwise around the island. If you have one of each resource — molasses, wood, goat, cutlass — you can build a camp on an empty space adjacent to the ship. If you don't have what you need, you can trade any two resources for one of your choice, or you can spend a wood and a goat for random help from Coco the parrot. You don't know what Coco might give you, but ideally it's better than the wood and goat you just sacrificed to him!

After you build all your camps, you can build a fort on an empty space by spending two of each resource, and whoever does so first wins.