Hanabi (card game)

Hanabi, a Japanese word meaning fireworks, is a cooperative card game created by the French designer Antoine Bauza and first published in 2010, going on to win the Spiel des Jahres award for best board game in 2013. It is played by two to five people using a deck of numbered cards in five colors, and its defining twist is that players hold their cards facing outward, so that each player can see every other player's hand but not their own. Working together rather than competing, the group tries to play cards from every color in ascending numerical order to build a simulated fireworks display, succeeding or failing as a team. Because no one can see their own cards, players must rely on a strictly limited number of hint tokens to tell each other useful information about rank or color, and on careful use of a separate discard pile, to decide which unseen card to risk playing next. The game has been published under different editions by R and R Games, Cocktail Games and Abacus Spiele.