Sunday, June 14, 2015

Playing With Fireworks While Drinking Mead.

On Today's segment Claire and I hit the New Day Meadery in fountain square.  We've been to New Day several times and have always enjoyed their mead and atmosphere.  For the most part their staff seem pretty respectful, and they have a monthly rotating art gallery which is really nice.  New Day has their own selection of board games for their customers, but as usual we brought in one of our own games to review. 
Today's game of choice was Hanabi.  This game offers a very unique twist on card playing, unlike anything you've ever tried.  The habit that we all have is to look at our hand when we draw cards, but not in Hanabi.  This is a memorization and push your luck game.  There is strategy, but mostly this game is all about communication.  You hold up your hands so that everyone else at the table can see your hand.  The only thing you are supposed to see in your hand is the back of the cards.  The cards are numbered from 1 to 5 and colored red, blue, green, yellow and white with an optional wild card deck.  You are trying to build up every kind of color from 1 to 5 matching in a row by giving very specific information to the other players.  When it is the active players turn, you have a few choices.  You can either play a card to build your row of fireworks, but if you do this, you must be matching the correct color and number in numerical order from 1 to 5 otherwise, you take a fuse token.  If you end up using up all of your fuse tokens, the game is over.  You can also choose to point out to one of the players at the table either a set of matching numbers or matching color cards.  This will be up to the other player to remember those cards in their hand.  By providing this information, the players must place an information token in the center of the table.  The last option is discard a card from your hand and if you do so, you can get back another information token that you spent at an earlier time.
It's not always easy to play this game, especially if the cards you draw from the main deck are not what you are needing from the beginning.  This can really make or break the game.  Today however, Claire and I were victorious and built a perfect set of fireworks for 25 points!  For a perfect score, the game says we are legendary, everyone left speechless, with stars in their eyes!  This game is really fun, but it can also be a little nerve wracking to get through depending on who's at the table.  The whole idea is to come up with your own way of communicating to each other so that strategically the cards that you have can be utilized in the most efficient manner.  I really like memorization games and the portability of this one is excellent.  It's housed in a really small box which is great for taking on family trips or to game night events.  This is a great well-rounded game to have in your collection.

Hanabi
Overall Meeple Rating: 7/10



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1 comment:

  1. This game was enjoyable when I have played. It really is game that can tell how well you communicate and remember things as it more information comes in and cards change.

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