Fire(Hop)works

I spent most of Memorial Day being a lazy as possible. All TV and video games, until Liz got home. We headed out to HUB (Hopworks Urban Brewery). Liz suggested we bring...

Hanabi 2-5 players

This card game is just backwards and I mean that literally. It's a cooperative game where you know what everyone else has in their hands, but you have no clue what is in your hands. You are attempting to put on an amazing fireworks display. The success of the display is dependent on the cards you play. The basic deck has 5 colors of fireworks each with the numbers 1 through 5 (more of the smaller numbers and only one 5). During your turn, you usually have three options: give a player one piece of information about their cards, play a card, or discard a card. There are 8 "communication tokens" at the start of the game. If you take the communication action you remove a token. If there aren't any tokens, you can't take that action. When you do communicate you can tell one player about one characteristic of their cards. You can tell them about the value or color, but you must be complete with the information. For example, if the other player has a red 2 and 3 and a blue 2 and 4 and you really want them to play the red 2 you're a bit screwed. You either have to tell them about both reds or both 2's. This means it'll probably take two turns or you have to hope the player is good at guessing. When playing cards, each color must start with 1 and work up to 5, no repeats. If a card doesn't fit in the series yet, you discard it and suffer a strike against you. The team only is allowed 3 strikes. If you choose to discard a card instead of playing it, then you get one of those precious "communication tokens" back. Once the strikes knock you out or you run out of cards to draw, the game ends. You add up the highest card of each color and compare it to the legend in the instructions.

We started out pretty good. We screwed our yellow fireworks early only getting only the 1 out. We finished the red, white, and green fireworks. We ended the game early since we knew we had discarded all the cards that would let us continue. We had a score of 20 which is pretty good out of 25. The manual describes it as "excellent, crowd pleasing". One point away from amazing.

Tally: 52/152  Bonus: 13/50