Koi-Koi

Koi-Koi is a popular Japanese card game played with a hanafuda deck of forty-eight cards, each decorated with imagery tied to one of the twelve months of the year rather than the suits used in a Western deck. Traditionally played between two people, the game unfolds as players match cards from their hand and from a shared layout to cards of the same month, collecting matched pairs into a scoring pile. The object is to assemble specific card combinations known as yaku from the cards a player has accumulated; once a yaku is completed, that player may choose to end the hand and bank the points, or call koi-koi, a Japanese phrase meaning come on, to keep playing in hope of forming further, higher scoring combinations before an opponent claims a stronger hand first. The tension between banking a modest score and risking it for a larger one is central to the game's appeal, and it remains one of the most widely played hanafuda games in Japan today.