Game Spotlight – Hanabi

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Hanabi: cards on the left and the deluxe tile version on the right.

Here’s a fun cooperative game from R and R Games Inc. called Hanabi. The premise is that you all are putting on a fireworks show but someone somewhere has messed up the order and now nobody knows which fireworks are what. There is no time to sort it out, everyone must pitch in and try to put on the best show possible or go home in deep dishonor.

Hanabi comes in 2 flavors: The inexpensive but limited cards version and the incredibly overpriced but oh so fanCAY tiles version (for reference, you can pick up the cards for $12 but the tile set runs $60. The tiles are well worth it though if you can get them on a good discount). Each set comes with 5 colored fireworks suits and 1 “wild” suit (we will talk about that later), 4 explody timers and 8 guess tokens. You are tasked with building up the fireworks from 1 to 5 in as many suits as you can. The catch is, you can’t look at your hand.

Everyone plays their hand face out so although you can’t see your own hand, you can see everyone else’s hand (and vice versa). In order to build a firework in the correct order (starting with 1 and working to 5 in the same color suit), players use guess tokens to give hints about the cards/tiles in people hands in the manner of “You have X number of RED fireworks” or “You have X number of THREES”. The hint giver will also point out which cards or tiles fit the criteria. Guess tokens can be regained by discarding cards/tiles or finishing off a firework correctly.  Each fireworks suit has a certain number of cards/tiles per number (see the pic) so if you discard a ONE, there should be 2 more of them in the deck/pile to put in play. If you discard that FIVE, however, you have hosed that color of firework as there is only one FIVE in each of the suits.

The trick is to give your hints to the other players in a way that helps them play their cards/tiles. I told Sharkie that he had 1 ONE and he put that ONE down since it was the first tile out and there is no way he can screw up by semi-blind placing it.  Sharkie looks at my hand

Here is my hand-don’t tell me what I have!

and sees a couple options. It’s early game so I shouldn’t be discarding to get hint tokens back but he will want to let me know I have a FIVE so I don’t discard it willy nilly and ruin the green suit. I also have duplicate red FOURS which are good for discards. Further, I have a “wild” one, which we are playing as a sixth suit in this case. Sharkie can tell me I have 1 ONE, and hope my thought process goes, “Sharkie has pointed this out for a reason, if he didn’t think I should play it, he would have pointed out something else!” and I play that ONE. Sharkie opts to tell me I have a FIVE.

Organizing my hand with the information I know. Sharkie has told me I have 3 FOURS and that I also have 2 RED tiles. The FIVE is off camera as we aren’t going to need it for a while and theoretically I don’t know what my last tile is.

Later on, Sharkie uses 2 hints to first tell me I have 3 FOURS, and then he tells me that I have 2 RED tiles. In this way, I am not likely to play a red FOUR on the red ONE in play. And I can use the info I have to discard one of the red FOURS to get a token back.

If Sharkie tells me I have 2 RED tiles first, there is a small chance I might play one of the red FOUR tiles on that hint and mess up the red firework (right pic). If I do, we get an explody token. There are 4 explody tokens so you can mess up 3 times before the whole platform goes up in a wild conflagration. Instead, Sharkie plays it safe and tells me I have 3 FOURS and then 2 REDS so I discard a redundant red FOUR and gain a guess token back (left pic – We haven’t yet moved the token to the correct pile there. Or at least that is what I’m going with).

One does not necessarily win this game, rather one builds enough correct fireworks to put on a good or even spectacular show. Or one goes home and moves to another province because one has failed badly. Fireworks are serious business. 

Things I liked: 

So pretty! And well designed.
  • The tile set is really the way to go with this game if you can get it for $25-$30 (or better $15 because you had a LOT of discount coupons). The tiles are really solid and have a pleasing weight to them. Plus, they offer more options for organizing what tiles you have info on and what tiles you do not than the cards do.
  • I love the scoring points flavor text.
  • This is not an easy game but when you get a firework completed you feel like Prometheus.  Seriously, it takes quite a bit of effort to get a complete firework built that when you do…WOOOOOO!!!

Things I didn’t like: 

  • The card version, although better priced for the casual gamer, is hard to read in low light and hard to organize for info you receive about your cards. The backs aren’t as different as I’d like for flipping them upsidown and putting them sideways is just awkward. We found that the tile version fixes the low light differentiation problem and you can organize the tiles in more ways than the cards.
  • You get 8 hints but you would be surprised how fast they go. Inevitably someone winds up with no information and no hint tokens left and has to blindly discard from their hand. It can take a while to get into the groove of how to give hints and the interim time spent getting over that learning curve can put people off.
  • The “Wild” suit. I don’t know what definition  R and R is using for “wild” but in every other game I’ve played, a “wild” thing can sub in for any other game piece. Not so much here. It’s almost that case in Variant 2, but then you play it as a multi colored suit anyway, rather than being able to build Blue ONE, Blue TWO, Multi THREE, Blue FOUR… NOTE: If you play this as a 6th suit it makes the game much harder. We usually just don’t play with the multi colored set, or maybe you can house rule it into a proper wild card.