Hanafuda

Hanafuda is a family of Japanese playing card games played with a deck of 48 cards divided into twelve suits of four, one for each month of the year, each suit illustrated with flowers, plants, animals or other seasonal imagery instead of the pips and face cards of a Western deck. The cards descend from a Portuguese playing-card deck brought to Japan in the mid-sixteenth century; the design was reworked into its flower-suited form during the Edo period as gambling reformers repeatedly banned earlier card games, and the resulting Hanafuda decks are noticeably smaller and stiffer than standard Western cards, measuring about 5.4 by 3.2 centimetres. The cards support a range of matching and scoring games for two to four players, and remain a fixture of Japanese card-game culture and, through related decks, of card games played elsewhere in East Asia.