Magic Tricks

The two people behind IndianWolf Studios, the husband and wife team of Jason and Antonietta Johnson, have created a wonderful rule-book as part of two project that also included the creation of two custom decks of Hanafuda playing cards, the Hanami edition and the Sensu edition. Apparently rules for Hanafudu games can be hard to find or interpret, so IndianWolf Studios has done the hard work for us by putting this material together into a lovely book, which is available as a hard copy or as an eBook.

It's an impressive full-colour 236 page book, and contains a collection of 37 different games organized into sections for four main types of games: Capture Games, Sequence Games, Luck Games, and Fusion Solitaire Games. Within each section the games are arranged by difficulty, using a handy color code. A final section at the end of the book contains handy Quick Reference Charts, which help out with scoring. Within the explanations themselves are game-play and scoring examples, pictures, and variants.

Some of the Fusion Games will be immediately familiar to anyone who has some experience with Western card games, such as the three solitaire games Pyramid, Solitaire, and Eight Off, while games like Hana-Rumi and Hana-Gin have obvious parallels with the counterparts that inspired them: Rummy and Gin. But these are mainly designed to get people familiar with the Hanafuda deck. And it is really the Hanafuda games in this book that are of special interest.

The Luck Games are good for social settings, and are fast and fun, whereas the Sequence Games require you to empty your hand and have a more serious and thoughtful feel to the game-play. But what people will especially find interesting is the Capture Games category, where game-play revolves around capturing cards from a field and creating point-scoring combinations. This style of gameplay is reminiscent of traditional and popular card games like Scopa and Cassino.

If you are starting from scratch, I'd recommend beginning with the Simplified Game for Beginners and with Matching Flowers, to familiarize yourself with the cards. Then eventually work yourself up to the classic and popular Japanese two player game Koi-Koi. When you're ready for it, give the more complex 2-7 player game Go-Stop a try, because this is arguably the most popular game played with Hanafuda cards in Korea. Higo-bana is a version of Hanafuda that is very popular in Hawaii, and is also included in the book, and can be recommended.

The beauty of a good rulebook like this one, is that it is a terrific resource that really helps people with a Hanafuda deck get started in exploring this new world of possibilities. An excellent volume that I highly recommend to anyone interested in games that can be played with Hanafuda playing cards. - BoardGameGeek reviewer EndersGame