Does The Best Design In Tabletop Gaming Have to be Fun?
Most people who have heard anything about modern tabletop gaming know co-operative games. News outlets like to latch on to the concept in their perennial “UNBELIEVABLE! People are playing board games, and GET THIS! They AREN’T CHILDREN OR PERVERTS” stories, and it’s often a good idea to ease new gamers into the hobby with games where players work together to achieve a common goal rather than stomp on each other in a mad dash for the highest score.
Top co-op games like Pandemic, Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, Ghost Stories, etc., tend to follow the same pattern.
- Players do things in an attempt to effect positive change in pursuit of their win condition.
- Events are randomly generated (via dice or drawing a card from a deck, generally) that effect negative change, edging the players’ win condition farther away and advancing their loss condition.
- Players attempt to mitigate the damage done by the random events, attempt to prepare for the crappy events to come, while still pushing towards their win condition.
- More random events.
This goes on until the players have won or lost. And hey, this is fine. This kind of design ensures that there’s constantly a threat to deal with, and since the threat is random, you never know what your big problems will be until they’re all up in your face. You get to make interesting decisions: do I clean up the mess the random events just made, or ignore it and hope it doesn’t come back to bite me? Do I plan for the worst or hope the next batch of random events are relatively benign? Fun! Yeah! There’s a reason people like these games.
But there’s a problem. Games like these tend not to have secret information. That is, no player knows something the others don’t. Anyone can look at the board and know everything about what has happened, what needs to happen, and what the players can possibly do.
Two problems with this. First, an experienced player can use this information to calculate optimal moves, leading her to either boss around the other players or cringe internally as they make dumb moves. In extreme cases, there isn’t even a need for other players, as one person could easily control multiple game pieces. That’s no good. Second, a group can “solve” the game, figuring out through trial and error how to win as often as possible. Games can mitigate this by being absurdly difficult, but then you risk starting a game where the deck of random bad events is shuffled such that the game is literally unwinnable. That’s no good.
Enter Antoine Bauza’s Hanabi. With a deck of 50 cards and a handful of cardboard tokens, Bauza made a $10 game that won the Spiel des Jahres, gaming’s top prize (nearly unthinkable for a budget card game with a single page of rules), and fixed the problems of co-op gaming with one shockingly simple and elegant masterstroke. But I’ll get to that later.
What is Hanabi?
Japanese for “fireworks,” Hanabi is predictably a game where players are Japanese pyrotechnicians working to plan the most dazzling fireworks show possible. This backstory is irrelevant to the actual game, though. What you are actually doing is drawing cards and putting them in order.
Hanabi’s fifty cards consist of five different colored sets of cards: white, blue, red, green, and yellow. Each colored set has three cards numbered “1,” two cards each for “2,” “3,” and “4,” and a single “5.” The object of the game is to play cards in numerical order (1 to 5) for each color until you have five colored columns of five numbers each. Blue 1 to Blue 5. Red 1 to Red 5. And so on.
So why is this difficult at all? Why does Hanabi fix the problems of co-op gaming with one simple and elegant masterstroke?
Good question. Each player holds their cards backwards. That is, they don’t know what cards they’re holding, but everyone else does.
And that has made all the difference.
Why are you making this out as such a big deal, man
Because no longer does the game only work if you have randomly generated threat providing the challenge. The threat is figuring out what the hell cards are in your hand.
Because this is the co-op game that forces the players, more than any other co-op game, to co-operate. You can play Pandemic by yourself. You can play Flash Point by yourself. You can’t play Hanabi by yourself. The only way you’ll ever know what cards are in your hand is if the other players spend their turn giving you hints.
Because the game is crushingly difficult, but fair. Hanabi will see your hands shaking as you agonize over which card to play. Is this the red 3? Didn’t she tell me this was a three earlier? Oh god, here it goes…and it’s a blue 2, everyone loses! The sheer difficulty of the puzzle itself makes artificial threats unnecessary. But an experienced group will work like a creepy posthuman hivemind, picking up layers of implication from every hint, laying the cards down in perfect order like a machine. Difficult, but fair. It’s hard, but not out to get you.
And oh man, it’s so elegant. Bauza did this without the kind of super-stuffed design that is the norm in boardgaming, where every game costs $60, comes with a dozen different decks of cards and 20 pages of rules. He did it by going “ha, what if I told them they had to put cards in order but they didn’t know what cards they had?”
Here’s the rub: Is it fun?
The answer is: kind of, if you’re trying to have fun.
What is sure, though, is that Hanabi is stressful. It’s a masterpiece of design, and no one I’ve played it with has enjoyed it.
Imagine: the other players have given you hints about what cards are in your hand, and the time has come for you to play one. The other players are certain that their hints have made it painfully obvious which card to play. You sheepishly play the wrong one. You doof, you blew it. MORON.
Or even worse: you know exactly what to do, and confidently pick a card and slap it on the table, and…it’s the wrong one. The correct one was right next to it and you misremembered which one was where. You doof, you blew it. MORON.
Or even worse: you’re new to board gaming and liked that Pandemic game you played last week. You liked working together with your friends, and when you weren’t sure what to do, your friend who knows a lot about the game gave you a lot of good suggestions. There were a few times you didn’t know what was going on but the other players helped you out until you caught on. Now you’re playing Hanabi. You have no idea what cards you have. You’ve forgotten most of the hints you’ve been given since you weren’t sure what their point was. You have to play a card and are entirely without a clue. You play something at random. It is an incorrect card. Everyone groans. You doof, you blew it. MORON.
The root of all these situations is that Hanabi demands laser-focused mental dedication from every player. You must pay attention to every clue and remember which of your cards is which. Your focus cannot falter for a moment, because you can and will get lost and end up playing dumb cards out of order like a dumb butt. And remember how I said Hanabi was by far the most co-operative of any co-op game? That blade cuts both ways. Every time you make a mistake, you are directly disappointing the increasingly frustrated friends you’re playing with. They took pains to give you the information you needed to do right, and you did wrong. You doof, you blew it. MORON.
Does that matter, though?
Let no one say Chess or Go are not perfect game designs. Neither shall anyone say that they are fun for a new player pitted against a master. They’ll feel like a doof, a moron who blew it, and will have little idea what they could have done differently.
Does Hanabi deserve the same forgiveness we extend to Chess and Go? A case can be made that the “experienced player” that destroys the new player in Chess is, in Hanabi’s case, the game itself. Sure, it’s brutally difficult and demands a lot from the players, but the game is beautiful and the group will improve with study and practice. Seems a good comparison.
It gets complicated when we bring up social group dynamics. People will feel embarrassed by a bad Hanabi play, or judged, or like they disappointed their friends, and that’s not a feeling you have in Chess or Go. You may feel humiliated when a better player crushes you, but you didn’t let anyone down.
Hanabi is also separated from Chess and Go by a dependence on the group’s collective skill rather than individual ability. If a group has one Hanabi expert, they’ll still do horribly if she’s playing with new people who aren’t used to the way she gives clues and remembers which card is which. A group grows together, learning how to communicate efficiently, but breaking the group up takes you back to zero. Thus you’ll find Hanabi experts frustrated that new players don’t know about gameplay conventions that are second nature to veterans. One chump futzing around will ruin the best laid plans no matter how good the other players are. So we find discord sown.
But enough about Hanabi’s faults. Let’s remember that this is a game that deserves to be discussed in the same breath as Chess and Go. It is, by all estimations, a masterpiece of game design. It demands a lot, yeah, and can be opposite-of-fun level stressful, but when your group clicks? When you lay down the 2, the 3, the 4, the 5? When you finally slay the beast that is this vicious game? It’s incredible. It’s transcendent and triumphant and glorious.
You didn’t win because you got lucky and the deck only spat up toothless threats. You didn’t win because of lucky dice rolls. You didn’t win because one player told everyone what to do. You won because you all are geniuses and communicated like a team. Now to do better. Now to become perfect.
And that’s when you add the sixth color.
