Dicebreaker Recommends: Hanabi, a crowdpleasing co-op card game worthy of summer nights

Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker. Don’t forget to also check-out their list of the best co-op board games.

Despite the UK’s association with fireworks and autumn, arguably the best time for firing off pyrotechnics is the summertime. The nights are warmer and the skies are often clearer. Also, summer is the kind of season where humanity often feels the desire to do ridiculous things like eating an ice cream on one of Brighton’s several seagull-infested beaches. Which is why Hanabi, a card game where the aim is to put on the greatest display of fireworks the world has ever seen, is such a suitable tabletop experience for this time of year.

Hanabi is also the perfect size for summer because it’s small and light enough to be easily taken to the pub, to a picnic or another outdoorsy locale. But ultimately it’s Hanabi’s gameplay that solidifies it as a fantastic game to bring with you to any summery social occasion, purely due to the fact that it’s incredibly easy to learn and extremely fun to play.

Hanabi is a co-op card game for two to five players that’s all about giving good communication and choosing your actions wisely. This may appear to be a very lighthearted game – and it is! – but it still has its fair share of squeaky-bum moments that could result in either complete success or utter failure. The game’s deck is made up of five sets of coloured cards, each numbered one to five. There are different amounts of each number in every set, with the number one being the most plentiful and the number five being the least.

The aim of the game is to play each numbered card from every set in sequence from one to five without making too many mistakes. This may sound deceptively simple, but there is a pretty major catch in Hanabi – the players cannot see their own cards, only those of their fellow players. Not being able to see your own hand is a huge barrier to completing what is an otherwise very simple objective, but it’s where most of the fun and the challenge comes from. Other players cannot play cards that aren’t in their own hand, instead, they have to rely on the information carefully communicated by their teammates.