Three-card Hanabi — hidden hands and clues
In Hanabi you can see everyone's cards except your own. You hold your cards facing outward: your teammates see them, and you work out yours from their clues.
From Hanabi (a famous cooperative card game).
What it shows a designer
Hidden hands turned inside out: you see everyone's cards except your own, so the team depends on a few limited clues. It shows how a limit on talking can become the whole game.
Credits
- Made by
- Antoine Bauza, published 2010 as Hanabi
- This version
- A homemade cut-down: three colours, three players
What you need
- 12 small paper cards — write numbers 1–4 in three colours (red, blue, green). 4 cards per colour.
- a paper to track which cards have been played
How to play
- Make the cards. On 12 small paper cards, write red 1–4, blue 1–4, green 1–4.
- Deal sideways. Shuffle. Deal 2 cards to each of the 3 players and put the rest face down as a draw pile. Hold your cards FACING OUTWARD: your teammates see them, you don't. Put 4 clue tokens (coins or paper bits) in the middle. The player who dealt goes first; play goes clockwise.
- Three actions. On your turn do ONE of three things. (a) GIVE A CLUE: spend a clue token and tell one teammate about one colour or one number in their hand, pointing to every card of it ('these two are red', 'this one is a 3'). No clue when the tokens are gone. (b) PLAY a card. (c) DISCARD a card face up and take a clue token back.
- Play in order. Cards are played in order, one row per colour: red 1, then red 2, red 3, red 4, and the same for blue and green. When you play a card, put it face up: if it is the next number in its colour it joins that row; if not, it is discarded and the team loses a life. You have three lives. After playing or discarding, draw a card if any are left.
- The end. The game ends when the third life is lost, or when the draw pile is empty and everyone has had one more turn. Count the cards in the rows: that is the team's score. You can't say 'play your red 2'; that limit is the game.
After playing, talk about
- When did clue-giving feel hard?
- When did your team click?
- Did the restriction feel like a problem or like the point?
Its blocks
- hand management
- shared objective
- fully cooperative
- chance with mitigation
- hidden hands
- abstract
- take turns
How its blocks were checked against BoardGameGeek
- Hanabi: partly checkable, nothing against it. hand management: confirmed (Hand Management). shared objective: confirmed (Cooperative Game). fully cooperative: confirmed (Cooperative Game). chance with mitigation: not checkable. hidden hands: not checkable. abstract: not checkable. take turns: not checkable.
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