The quest for fire

 
I see Hanabi every so often. A lot of times on for sale posts. It’s a bit like Tom Cruise a lot smaller in person. Hanabi is a coop game so feel free to glaze over and drop out. The theme (which is not rich) is preparing fireworks for an event. Maybe Knavecon 7. It translates to trying to assemble between all the players the best hand of consecutive cards in four suits from one to five but here’s the sizzle you don’t get to see your own hand it’s always turned away from you, which does take a bit of getting used to

  
You get to see everyone else’s hands but you obviously can’t tell them what they have. What they do have are cards numbers one to five of four different suits/colours. During your turn you can burn a time token (there’s about twenty of these) and reveal a clue to any other player. So I could tell another player “you’ve got three ones in your hand” or “those two cards are green” (you can point at the actual cards)

During your turn you can discard to gain another time token or you can play a card. Here you need to be careful as you need to build a sequence of cards so a one needs to be laid first by someone then a two in the same color (or a one in a different color to start another stack) get it wrong and you flip a fuse token. Flip four and its game over count your score. The game also ends when you’ve run out of cards to play. 
Once it’s over you count up the highest values of cards laid out and everyone pats the player to the left and congratulates themselves….

The game falls down on a number of points. It’s coop. Once it’s over it’s a group win. There’s no sense of achievement. It’s far to easy to give out more clues to other players about cards to play (you can’t help it). It’s not particularly exciting and it’s taxing. You can’t play it without concentrating fully. That said it’s a little different and fun but the coop with little payoff sucks. A traitor mechanic or a team v team would be far superior but as it stands I’m only so so about it. As ever try it at Knavecon and make up your own mind. Until then
Huzzah!
Vic