Hanabi is a cooperative card game for 2-5 players. The premise is that some absentminded firework manufacturers accidentally mixed up their supplies right before a show is to start, so they have to work together to sort everything out to ensure the show is not a disaster.
Each firework is represented by a series of five cards of the same suit (color) placed in rising order. The goal is to build a firework of each color for a total of five, and doing so is an instant win. The game is immediately lost if players run out of fuse tokens by making too many errors, resulting in an explosion. Otherwise, the game ends when the last go-around ends which is started when the deck runs out. In that case, the score is calculated based on how many cards were successfully played.
Unlike most card games, players are not allowed to look at their own cards, only the cards of other players, so they rely on information the others provide about their cards when making decisions. There are only limited amount of clues players can give so one of the main strategy is to find ways to convey most information using the least amount of clues.
The game won the Spiel des Jahres award for best board game of 2013.
Tropes:
- Cartoon Bomb: The fuse tokens are black, circular pieces with lit fuses.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each suit is a different color: blue, red, white, yellow, and green. Only like colored cards can be placed together. Additionally, there's a sixth suit where the numbers/fireworks pictured are a rainbow of colors. How those are used depends on which advanced variant of the game is being played.
- Co-Op Multiplayer: Players work together to build sets of fireworks by relying on the information other players give them about the cards in their hands.
- Extrinsic Go-First Rule: According to the rules pamphlet, the player with the most colorful clothing goes first.
- Foreign Language Title: "Hanabi" means fireworks in Japanese, though the game was created by a French game designer.
- Gameplay Grading: At the end of the game, the "Artisan League Of Fireworks Technicians reference scale" in the rules grades players using a crowd's reaction:
- 0-5 points: horrible, booed by the crowd...
- 6-10 points: mediocre, just a hint of scattered applause...
- 11-15 points: honorable attempt, but quickly forgotten...
- 16-20 points: excellent, crowd pleasing.
- 21-24 points: amazing, they will be talking about it for weeks!
- 25 points: legendary, everyone left speechless, stars in their eyes!
- Instant-Win Condition: Inverted with the bomb tokens: make three mistakes and you cause an explosion that ends the game immediately. You don't even tally points like you would if you finished your fireworks or ran out of cards.
- Literal Wild Card: Inverted with the multicolor firework available as one of the provided variants. Said variant makes them a wild card, but this actually makes the game harder because they count as wilds only for identifying the card's color for the card holder when they still need to be built as a separate pile rather than going into the other suits.
- Scoring Points: As a cooperative game, players share a score, which is determined by the largest value of each firework. In the basic game, highest possible score is 25.
