Hanabi (Antoine Bauza, 2010), the winner of the Spiel des Jahres award in 2013, packs a great cooperative game into a small box of cards. Although the Green Box cards features no fireworks, and not the exact same sequence of numbers, you can certainly enjoy playing with your cards facing outwards and waiting for the others to tell you what you have in your hand.

At a glance:

2-5 players

20 minutes

Complexity: low

Components used:

All 54 cards

One Clock tile (wheel) and one Rocket tile (arrow).

4 red cubes and 8 blue.

Setup:

Shuffle the cards and deal 4 to each player (or 5 with 2-3 players). Leave the rest of the deck as a draw pile.

Each player picks up their cards, and without looking at them arranges them in a fan with the face of the cards outwards, so that all the other players except you can see your cards.

Place the 4 red cubes next to the Rocket tile, and the 8 blue next to the Clock tile.

Play:

On your turn, you can perform one of the following actions:

1: Play a card to the table.

Take a card from your hand, without looking at it, and place it on the table. The played card must start or continue a sequence of cards in its colour. Each colour can only have one sequence on the table, and the cards must be played in ascending order. The sequence doesn’t have to be complete, so if 1, 2 and 3 have been played you can add 4, 5 or 6, but not another 1, 2 or 3. If 1, 3 and 5 have been played you can also not play 4 or 2.

If the card you played is not valid, you put it in the discard pile, and also take one red cube and place it on the Rocket tile.

Draw a new card.

2: Give a hint to another player.

fireworks_1
Game of Fireworks in progress.

Point to one or more cards in another players hand and give her a piece of information. You can state either the number or the colour on the card(s), but not both. If the player has more cards of one colour, or with the same number, you can point to all of them (e.g. “These two cards are blue” or “These three have the value 1”).

After giving a hint, place one of the blue cubes onto the Clock. If there are no cubes to place onto the clock, then you can not give a hint this round.

3: Discard a card.

Take one card from your hand and place it in the discard pile. Now move one blue cube from the Clock back to the table. Draw a new card.

Game end:

The game ends when either of these conditions are met:

  • All the red cubes have been placed on the Rocket
  • All the colours have a sequence ending with a 6
  • The deck is empty. In this case all players get one final turn.

Now add up the values of all cards played correctly into the sequences on the table. This is your total score. Write it down and try to beat it in the next game!