Hanabi

Introduction

This year's Spiel des Jahres winner is a game called Hanabi. It's a cooperative card game, where the players are working on creating a fireworks display using a hand of cards exposed to all players but the owner. You hold your hand of cards backwards the entire game, so other players tell you the types of cards in your hand. There was a gameplay for it made available (along with the other Spiel des Jahres nominees) through the BoardGameGeekTV channel on YouTube. It's a little long, but the gameplay is the first 12 minutes, and it's a great example game to watch.

I really appreciated the game mechanics, and I went to a local game store to see if they had it. They sadly did not, and a couple websites I checked also didn't have the game available to order (as of this writing). So over the evening I took it on myself to make my own version. I had purchased a couple blank decks of Bicycle Cards through Amazon a few months ago, and this deck sounded simple enough to make.

Making a Deck

5 Permanent Markers and a $4 pack of blank playing cards.

I stuck with the 5 colors of the original game, and I tried to stick with the fireworks theme as much as permanent markers can allow (granted the green fireworks look like palm trees, but whatever).

Examples of the 5 colors.

Writing the numbers took maybe 15 minutes with drying time. The additional firework drawings added some more time, though that was more because I could use more of the permanent marker colors I had beyond the 5.

The cards mostly completed.

 In the rules I also read there are additional cards for a more difficult variant - where these five cards count as every color. The Bicycle blanks had 56 cards total, so I used five for the muilticolored cards. The last will probably include the scoring notes (for instance, 0-5: Horrible ... 25: Legendary).

Multicolored cards for the "Avalanche of Colors" variant.

Conclusion

In the end I'm pretty happy with the results - for not doing a whole lot of work. And I get to play the winner of the Spiel des Jahres now instead of trying to dig around for something. I'll probably get the real game eventually, but in the meantime crafting my own version will get me playing a good new game when it becomes scarce.

[Instagram Video]