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Hanabi - anyone played this?
Hi all, I just heard about Hanabi this morning - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98778/hanabi or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanabi_(card_game) - and wondered if anyone here had experience of it? It's a cooperative card game in which you start with perfect knowledge of the other players' cards and zero knowledge of your own, and attempt together to reach a desired target. My encounter was in the sphere of AI research where some see it as a good test ground for cooperative behaviour where the players have imperfect knowledge, so posing quite a different problem to say chess or Go. Do we have any human players of it here who could comment?
Comments
I've played it a few times. It's a fun little game.
We tend to play with some conventions to help things along, such as having a fixed ordering of cards in the hand so that people know what I'll play or discard next, explaining my reasoning out loud so that everyone knows what I know, and the convention that if I give you a clue about a card, I probably want you to play it.
There's also quite a bit of meta-reasoning, along the lines of "If I had a card that was good to play, someone would have told me about it. As no-one's told me anything, it must be that I've got nothing useful to do, so I'll discard a card, giving us some more resource to use later."
Hanabi is fantastic. You probably need to play a few times with the same group to get into each other's head.
Relatedly, look at Pikoko, a trick-taking card game where you see everyone's hands but your own: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/244505/pikoko