#7 - Hanabi
Hanabi is without a doubt my favourite co-operative game. Co-op games, where the players work together to accomplish a shared objective rather than competing, have become increasingly popular over the past few years. I think co-op games as fitting into three main groups: “Alpha Player” games, like Pandemic, where the player most familiar with the game can advise the others on what to do so that the team can achieve victory; time constraint games, like Space Alert, which eliminates Alpha Players because the game moves too quickly for coherent communication in the heat of the moment; and traitor games, like Battlestar Galactica, where one or more players are secretly working against the rest, making it difficult to know who to trust. Each type is fun in its own right, but Hanabi is in a category all of its own: its not so much a game as it is a trust fall disguised as one. That allows it to better evoke the essence of co-operation than any game I can possibly imagine. If you've ever been a camp counsellor, you're familiar with the concept of a trust fall. Designed to create group cohesion, trust falls involve one person standing on a picnic table or fence or some other high surface, crossing their arms over their chest and falling backwards, trusting that their friends and colleagues below will catch them. Its a pretty scary experience, letting yourself go and putting your safety entirely into the hands of others. But its an important message to get across: working in a team-based, high-risk environment, you put yourselves at the mercy of other people's competence every day, so its an experience you had better get used to. If you don't trust others fully, you'll only end up getting hurt. Furthermore, if even one person doesn't live up to that trust, the whole team fails. That's the lesson Hanabi embodies.
The components are simple. You've got a deck of cards in five different colours, each numbered 1 through 5. The 5s in each colour are unique, but the other numbers have multiples. The basic goal is, turn by turn, to play cards in order, from lowest to highest, in their respective colours – the blue 2 goes on top of the blue 1 and the white 5 goes on top of the white 4. At the end of the game, the group's score is the sum total of the highest cards they've played in each colour, making 25 (all five 5s being played) the perfect score and the ultimate goal.
The twist is that you have to hold your cards backwards, so that they're facing the other players. That's right, you can only see what other people's cards are, not your own. This makes playing the cards in order a much more difficult proposition, especially since any time you play a card out of order or play a card that's already been played, the card is lost and the team gets a strike. Three strikes and the whole team automatically loses. Playing cards randomly is not a viable option.
You therefore need to give each other information, but that too is difficult. On your turn, instead of playing a card, you can give one other player a clue. However, the types of clues allowed are very specific – you can give information about a number or a colour, but not both. Additionally, every time you give a clue you spend a token and once all the tokens are gone, no more clues can be given. You can discard a card to regain a clue token, but that can lose you important cards or simply stall the game, neither of which is ideal, so discards have to be rationed. No communication is allowed outside the use of these tokens, meaning that every clue you give has to be as informative as possible or you're simply wasting time.
These elements come together to create the experience I described earlier: a game where every play has the nervous weight of a trust fall. Because no player knows exactly what cards they have, each becomes the others' spotter, making certain that when it comes to their turn, they'll have a good, safe move to make. If you make a mistake on your turn, it's as much my fault as it is yours, because I shouldn't have let you get into a position where you could make that mistake. Of course, you shouldn't have let me get into the position where I had to put you into that position – and so the Ouroboros of trust continues, with each of the players being a crucial link to the others' success. If any one fails – if one arm falters when trying to catch the weight falling on it– the whole thing comes crashing down. The strict limits on communication reinforce this dynamic. Even if I think I know the best clue for somebody else to give or the best card to play in a given situation, I can't say so. I have to trust my teammates to do their best. Likewise, it doesn't matter if one player knows the game better than the rest, because a team in Hanabi is only as strong as its weakest player and there's nothing you can do to help a weak player during the game.
However, there's lots that can be done to improve weak play outside of the game and that creates another parallel between Hanabi and trust falls. It's a terrible idea to do trust falls with people who've just met each other: because these people have no bonds or common experience, they are bound to fail dangerously. Similarly, a game of Hanabi with four players who have just met is going to end in disaster. The game is so much about knowing your teammates and picking up on subtleties that to play it well, you really need to play over and over again with the same group, establishing conventions that will allow you to squeeze more information from the few meagre clues you have access to. The trust required to be successful at Hanabi is difficult to obtain among strangers. I
No game captures co-operation the same way Hanabi does. There's no time limit to create anxiety, only the stress of not knowing your cards. There's no traitors trying to screw you up, only the fear that your teammate will make a ruinous mistake. There's no Alpha Player ordering you around, only four equals, all trying to pull their weight as best they can. There's simply no other game like it. Trust me.
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All pictures taken by me.
For our group, it was extremely difficult to play Hanabi WITHOUT cheating. As in, "You have two twos. THISSSSS one. And this one." Then, when we finally all agreed to not cheat, it wasn't as fun.
ReplyDeleteWell, if you didn't find it fun, there's nothing I can say to counter that. But I will say that I think not cheating is a pretty important part of the game, as it adds constraints that create interesting challenges. If you can just tell people whatever you want, the game ceases to be challenging and requires much less of the trust between partners that I feel is the core of the experience. Then again, different people have different thresholds for what constitutes acceptable cheating, so if you've found a threshold you're comfortable with, I say go for it.
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