Hey Waiter!

Hey Waiter! is the first published design from Tichu fan extraordinaire Anthony Rubbo, and while it's not a trick-taking game, it is a game with tricky card play. Each player is a waiter trying to deliver his stack of dishes before anyone else, with the dishes being represented by a stack of colored chips on a face-down card.

Players each have a hand of cards, a few of which might be special action cards while the majority will be divided into two narrow rectangles. To play these cards, the player chooses two cards and uses the right half of one card and the left half of the other. Thus with a handful of cards, each half of a card can be combined in up to a half-dozen ways. The cards let you take actions like moving a token from one stack to another, with the primary action being to deliver food. When you deliver a dish, however, everyone with that type of dish on top of his stack gets to deliver it, so ideally you can first place a token on the opponent’s stack in order to lock down that dish.

You can also split your stack into two or more stacks, thereby giving you more opportunities to deliver dishes – but doing so reduces your hand size and limits the chances that you'll be able to do what you want!