LogFAQs > #933899663

47. Hanabi (2010)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Cluegiving, restricted communication, sequence-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20 minutes
Experience: 25+ games over 15+ sessions (2015-2019)
Previous ranks: 51/100 (2016), 19/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player holds four cards so that everyone else can see them, but not the cardholder. On your turn, you either use a token give a hint - color or number - about a specific player's cards, discard a card to draw another and gain a token, or play a card. Playing a card means choosing a card and seeing if it is next in line in any of the sequences: 1 through 5 in every color. Once the deck is drawn or four incorrect cards are played, you sum the top numbers of all your sequences, and that's your score.

Design - This is the highest-ranked Antoine Bauza game on my list, and aside from a Japanese theme, it's really interesting to see how different all his designs are. Anyway, Hanabi is simple and clever: You can give clues, but even those clues are painfully limited. Everyone has to be at least somewhat aware, and the game is absolutely rife with opportunities for misinterpretation.

Experience - I did not like Hanabi the first time I played it. A lot of people can get pretty damn upset if you misinterpret their clues, and it feels like there can be a lot of passive-aggressiveness. And honestly, the game kind of engenders that. Unlike Pandemic where you can really talk through things and come to agreements (and feel bad when someone is dominating the game), here you can feel bad because you misremembered or misinterpreted a clue and played out of turn or threw away a key number. It's kind of a daunting prospect.

And yet, I saw the game for $5 over a year later and picked it up at Target and therefore decided to get some use out of it. And it turns out that taking the game less seriously, like so many other games, makes Hanabi better. Accepting that you'll make suboptimal plays is a key part of what makes Hanabi good. I've seen players agonize over a card, but in the end, the game is just more fun if you trust your teammates and shrug your shoulders - you're not going to deduce anything by waiting the extra thirty seconds to make a move. And quick play also allows multiple roudns of Hanabi in a single sitting, where a rhythm really develops.

Future - The new gaming partner doesn't specifically like Hanabi (though I wouldn't play it at two much) but approves of it as a quick game that anyone can get going. The fact that it is literally pocket-sized is another point in its favor. It has a very clear niche it can fill for travel or outdoors, and that makes it valuable.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness