My new favorite card game: Hanabi

I am not as big into board games as some – but I’ve picked a few favorites to play with my friends, and Hanabi quickly rose to the top. My conflicted feelings about Cards Against Humanity are enough for another article, but it cemented what kinds of game scratch that fun gaming itch with my friends. It’s quick paced, easy to jump in and out of games, and doesn’t take longer to play the game than to bloody well explain it to someone new playing it!

Image via http://www.thegamernerd.com/

Opinions aside on the humor of Cards Against Humanity, it reminded me that playing more than digital games with friends can be fun again! (I can’t tell you how utterly bored I got trying to play Settlers, or Puerto Rico, or other games that took what felt like an eternity to explain the rules when all I wanted to be doing was having fun with my friends around the table!) I love that the idea is simple – The entire game consists of a deck of cards, and a few chips. The deck has five different colored suits, numbered 1–5 in each color. The players are trying to place a row in the correct order from 1 to 5 for each color, with the added challenge that you don’t get to look at your own cards – you can only help the next player by giving them a hint about what is in their hand. If you want to point out that they have a “2” in their hand, you have to point out all the 2’s in their hand (same goes if you want to point out a red card – you have to tell them all the cards that are red). To give a hint it costs a token. If they play a wrong card that doesn’t fit in the order of the fireworks display, it costs a token. Run out of tokens? The game is over, and your fireworks display goes off! There is a bit more to the game than that, but it’s really that simple.

It’s fun because it’s quick, and cooperatively having fun at the table! Not that I don’t like competition – I will yell and scream with the rest of them at Knight Squad (for reals, my favorite party video game), but I like the camaraderie of Hanabi. You learn quickly who does and does not have a poker face while you are pulling out a card in your hand to play – is it the right card? Am I playing a card that will screw us all? WILL I ACCIDENTALLY SET OFF THE FIREWORKS? Maybe not that intense, but it does get amusing!

Lastly, the game is fast. I can’t imagine that the game would actually take 30 minutes like it says on the box – we usually wrap up a round in 15ish minutes. (Maybe longer if we stop to get a round of drinks, or distracted by BS’ing around the table – which okay, those happen with us every game – but I love that!) When we play the game, you are committing to a finite round of fun, and then you can be out. This isn’t Trivial Pursuit that you need to block out the next 3 to 29 hours of your day. This is by far my favorite game to take when we’re out and about with friends and time to kill (with a runner up of Uno!).

I’d love to hear if you have any other favorite fun games that are easy to learn and fast to play!