Boardgames Party: Hanabi

    Boardgames Party: Hanabi

    This time I'm going to present a Hanabi, a cooperative card game. It's super small, can easily be taken on trips to be played between 2-4 players.

    Each player is a fireworks maker in China, who have messed up the fireworks, right before the show is supposed to start. The twist is that nobody can see their own cards, but they can see what everyone else has.

    Time chips

    On your turn, you can share information, discard cards or play cards. When giving information to the other players, you can say either what numbers their cards have or what colours the cards are. But you can only share information when there is still "time" left, which can be bought by discarding cards. Because you can't see your own cards, you can easily discard good cards that you still need to complete your fireworks. Most cards come in duplicates, but the final ones (highest scoring ones) are available only in one of each color.

    The fuse

    The goal is to create 5 fireworks by placing cards of the same colour in order. If you place them in the wrong order, the fuse for the fireworks gets shorter.

    Scoring is done by summing up the highest card for each color. On our first game, we did pretty bad (15 points) and on our second one we got to 18 points, out of a maximum of 25. We'll have to play some more time until we get to that sweet 25!

    Example fireworks

    The game is quite short, one round lasting less than 30 minutes. The rules are also quite short, less than 1 page A4, so it's also easy to get started.

    Hanabi was a quite fun game. Score: 8