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When someone says fireworks to me, I’m always transported back in time to bonfire night as a kid which I loved. Family friends would be invited round, everyone would joke about my mum’s bonfire toffee breaking their teeth and Guy Fawkes would grin at me from a box of standard fireworks. Dad would be in charge of the bonfire, keeping it in check with a long wooden pokey stick (that’s a scientific term), and mum would be in charge of lighting the fireworks, chrysanthemum fountain always being a crowd pleaser. When all the fireworks had been lit, the sparklers had been sparked and the fire was just embers we’d head inside and I’d attempt to persuade everyone to play a board game – bet that came as a shock to you all!
Well, Hanabi is a cooperative game all about organising your own fireworks display with your fellow teammates to try and produce the most perfect display. However, unlike my parents back in the day, theres no need to provide a buffet of sausage rolls, quiche and jacket spuds, unless you want to of course.
Do you have a flare for pyrotechnics?
In Hanabi, you and your fellow pyrotechnicians will be attempting to lay cards of the same colour down from your hand into the communal display in the correct ascending numerical order, hopefully ending up with five perfect piles of fireworks. The kicker here is, the only cards you’ll be able to see, are everyone else’s as all cards will be facing away from the person holding them. So you’ll be relying on your teammates to give you the pertinent information you need, but even this is restricted.
On your turn you will have a choice of three actions to take, play a card, discard a card or tell another player something about their hand. To give a piece of information to a team mate about their cards, you must discard one of the eight time tokens, you do however get one of these tokens back every time anyone discards a card from their hand. If you choose to play a card, it must either start a new colour of firework or continue an existing one, if it doesn’t the card must be discarded and your fuse will get shorter. Three wrong cards played and you’ll run out of fuse and the whole show will explode bringing Hanabi to an end.
Don’t get con-fuse-ed
So in a perfect world, when we tell our teammates information, it would be great to go ‘this card is a green 2’ but obviously that’s not how it works! You can either tell them about one colour they hold or one number, and you can’t just point out one green card if they hold more than that, you must point them all out. Who knew planning a firework display would be so taxing!
You’ll need to really plan ahead and think about what information you give, to try and let your team know if there's a card they can play or afford to discard. And of course there are a limited number of each card, meaning some mistakes are much more costly than others, if you discard the wrong card, you may never be able to complete your fantastic show.
Should that not be complicated enough for you there is a 6th set of multicoloured fireworks you can introduce with several variants on how to play with this new set!
It’s not rocket science...
Hanabi, dependant on how seriously you take it can range from frustrating and desperate to chaotic and hillarious, although I’m sure my fellow gaming friends will tell you it falls into all categories if I’ve had the odd cider. The rules state that really you should only be communicating with your teammates other than when passing on information, but when we play there is always a fair bit of ‘does she need to know about those cards’ in between. Again it all boils down to how seriously you want to take the game.
There is also some scope for mild group cheating which is probably why they state you shouldn’t talk. Whether it’s a little teeth gritting while breathing in and muttering nope under your breath when someone slowly starts to select a card to discard or quite simply just reiterating what you already told someone whilst pointing at their cards, ‘well he knows these are red’ etc. This can be frustrating if not everyone is in the same mind set.
Not once have we ever successfully completed the fireworks display, although we came pretty close last time we played, so its absolutely doable, even if difficult. We have however never (ever) used the multicolour fireworks, were just not mentally ready for that! One of the rule variant’s for this is to class the multicolour as every colour when giving clues, so you could be told by one player it’s red, then the next could state its blue, thus hinting it’s the multicolour set. Which seems like it could add a whole new twist, especially if you have a penchant for rearranging the cards in your hand to help you remember what they are... and then subsequently forgetting what they are…
Hanabi is very thinky (another scientific term) not only trying to remember what information has been shared, but also trying to work out what you can afford to discard. It also produces some fantastic death glares of frustration from your fellow team mates… well it does when I play anyway.
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