Recently, Hanabi has become my go-to online social game. It produces anxiety, stress, elation, and curiosity. The premise is simple. You play through a deck of fifty cards. Each card displays a color (purple, red, yellow, green, or blue) and a number (1 through 5, inclusive). For each color, there are three 1s, two 2s, two 3s, two 4s, and one 5. Thus, 50 cards. You can add an additional ten cards for a rainbow color, but we’ll skip that aspect for this post. Your hand size varies depending on the number of players; for three players, you hold five cards. The goal is to play cards of each color in numerical order, 1 to 5. You can work on each of these color sets concurrently, in that you can move up the number continuum for each color at equal or separate rates. For example, you could have played the blue 1, 2, and 3; yet, only be at a 1 for the yellow color, and perhaps not even have started with the green, red, and purple colors. The number stack for each color can be built separate from each other color, with the dominant rule being that you must play numbers for a given color in numerical, increasing order.
The rub is that you do not see your own cards, but you see everyone else’s hand. During the game, you’re not to speak about the cards or convey strategy. You socialize about life, discuss books, share baking tips, wax on about aspirations, and generally behave as if you’re in a knitting circle or other imagined social gathering of your preference.
You begin a game with eight hint counters. On your turn, you can either discard a card and draw a new one, play a card, or give a hint by spending a hint counter. Discarding a card removes it from the game and earns you back a hint counter. Note that you cannot have more than eight hint counters. Playing a card means you go to add it to next lowest sequence for one of the color sets. If the card is a valid play, it is added to the set (i.e., the next number in the set for the given color). If it’s not playable, then it’s added to the discard pile. You do not receive a hint counter for a played card, whether it is a viable play or is discarded.
To give a hint, you inform another player which cards in that person’s hand are of a certain number of color. For example, you could indicate which cards are a 1 and then tap each of those cards. Or, you could say these cards are blue, and tap each of those cards. To give a hint, you indicate every card that fits the given criterium, thus if the person in the last example is holding three blue cards, you couldn’t just tap the one blue card that you want the person to play, but rather you must indicate that all three are blue.
I had encountered the game years ago, but in person its logistics overwhelmed me. For, memorizing what people had told you wasn’t easy. I would recite each clue perpetually, a sort of mantra. And, then you also need to recall what you’ve told other people as well. The magic of the game is deducing what you may have based on what others have shared and when they’ve shared that information. It’s a game of efficiency gained via deduction and navigating the imperfect information you possess is from which its magic arises.
Being distant from friends, we’ve turned to online implementations. There are many for Hanabi, but I’ve only tried one site. It’s bare bones. Simple. Yet, it’s elegant. Clues received appear on cards, indicating all info each player knows about a card. Thus, if you tell someone that two cards in the hand are 3s then the other cards become marked with a “not 3” symbol. Rather than provide a turn log, the screen displays the last move conducted, thus you must remember some details, in terms of when clues had been given, but the presentation alleviates the heaviest load of details you’d need to remember, namely what people know about their cards based via provided hints.
As you play, you develop a manner of sharing clues and expectations about such clues. Players develop a common set of assumptions and behaviors that resembles a modest language. You elate when a friend gets what you want done or not done, and everyone sighs collectively when a mistake gets made. Following games, we’ll turn to a text or video conversation to relay what went wrong and celebrate slick clues. I have fist pumped the air more than once due to a solid move, and if my friends had been near, we’d have exchanged high fives. I love the sense of accomplishment induced by a perfect score, playing 1 – 5 of all five colors.
Having explored Hanabi with the same two people, the rare times we’ve brought on another person have felt odd. The conversation of hints and plays becomes disjointed. The rhyhym is off. Misplays occur with frequency. These people have all been new to the game, so whether such a disconnect would occur with seasoned players, I know not, though I suspect that some standards we’ve incorporated into our games may be somewhat unique to our specific crew. Though, the spaces in-between various standards could likely be closed quickly. Something I’ve loved about certain games is how you feel them. In chess, I can sense another person’s strengths as turns accrue. Agricola provides a sense of dread as you time the options through possible worker placements against the clocking tick of the game’s hunger mechanic, where you lose points due to your game’s family members lacking enough sustenance. With Hanabi, playing with friends provides a sense of home
never want to go to bed as the weekend closes. The longer the time away from work, the harder it becomes for me to submit to slumber. Don’t misunderstand. My job is fine. True, it comes with equal parts absurdities and fulfillments, and the balance between these two aspects varies week-by-week, but—regardless of whether I view my vocation as a vacuous endeavor or a mental puzzle that evokes purpose or some variation in-between—the pleasure that owning your time and being able to flow down whatever streams float your boat shall always rise above the hours spent toiling within a job’s structure. To go from successive days of defining your hours freely to another bout of eight or nine hours spent emailing coworkers, meeting to discuss whatever or whatever, and generally navigating the bureaucratic aspects of employment inevitably reminds me that casting oneself from the rigidity of employment to the adventurous world of friends, play, and explorations shall forever be the honey that shall sweeten the sustenance that fuels me.