2013 Spiel des Jahres Game of the Year Winner!!

An intriguing and innovative card game. Race against the clock to build a dazzling fireworks finale! Trouble is, you can see the cards that everyone holds...except your own. Working together, you must give and receive vital information in order to play your cards in the proper launch sequence. Build and light each firework correctly to win the game and avoid a fizzling fiasco!

Hanabi—named for the Japanese word for "fireworks" and consisting of the ideograms "Flower" and "Fire".

The card deck consists of five different colours of cards, numbered 1–5 in each colour. For each colour, the players try to place a row in the correct order from 1–5. Sounds easy, right? Well, not quite, as in this game you hold your cards so that they're visible only to other players. To assist other players in playing a card, you must give them hints regarding the numbers or the colours of their cards. Players must act as a team to avoid errors and to finish the fireworks display before they run out of cards.

Each player is holding 5 cards if they are playing with 2 or 3 players, whereas they are holding 4 cards if they are playing with 4 or 5 players. Regardless of the number of participants, each turn consists of three options:

1) The player can give information about another player’s hand. This involves spending 1 of the 8 “time tokens”, and the player can tell another player either the rank of the cards they are holding (“You have two 3′s”) while pointing to them, or the player can tell another player the colour of the cards they are holding (“You have two red cards”) while pointing to them. Both pieces of information cannot be given at the same time, and information must be complete, which means that all of a given rank or colour must be pointed to at the same time in a player’s hand.

2) The player can play a card in the central game area. If someone is reasonably confident that their card can be played sequentially in the central area, they can choose this option. If they are incorrect (for instance, if they play a Red 3 when a Red 3 has already been played) then one of the “fuse tokens” is spent. If there are three missed plays over the course of the game, then the fuse expires and the fireworks go off – ending the game. Colors are scored as they are on the board at that point, and no more cards can be played.

3) The third thing that a player can do on their turn is discard a card. They must declare “I am discarding a card” so that there is no mistake that the card is being discarded out of play. Discarding a card has a key benefit, in that for every card discarded, a spent “time token” is able to be recovered.

Play progresses around the table until the fuse expires or all cards have been drawn from the draw pile.

Game design by famed Seven Wonders designer, Antoine Bauza.

2012 Juego del Año Finalist
2013 Spiel des Jahres Game of the Year Nominee
2013 Spiel des Jahres Game of the Year Winner

Contents:
60 Fireworks cards
12 Fuse and Time Tokens

Ages 8+ | 2 to 5 players | Playing time 30 minutes


Released: 06 February 2020