Thursday, July 07, 2016

Game of Hanabi

One of my daughters got a copy of the card game Hanabi for Easter. This situation—my children getting a game that I really like--presents a small problem for me. It's their game, but I want to play it and take it to friends' houses and treat it like my own. That's not a major problem, because I can't imagine my children telling me "no" when I ask if I can use one of their games, but it does make it look like I got them a game just so I could play with it myself. It just feels a bit awkward and would be easier if I just had my own copy, but then, it would feel silly to buy another copy when we already have the exact same thing in our family.

Anyway, I've played it a couple of time, and enjoyed it a lot. The most recent time was last weekend, when I played it with three friends. It felt awkward getting started because I was trying to simultaneously get them interested in the game, remember the rules, read the rules, and play the game for the first few minutes, but after a short period of time we all had it. And I had a lot of fun.

The most fun was seeing (and hearing) everyone working through their own internal debates on what to do on their turns, while also trying to keep from saying more than they were supposed to. It resulted in a continuous stream of incomplete sentences, along the lines of, "Well, if you have…and he has…wait, hold your cards up so I can see them…OK, but if I…and we have two clock tokens left…but then you could…no, wait, what about…so I could tell you…" I found it pretty funny.

We got a score of 18 without dropping too many accidental meta-hints, which I guess is pretty good.

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