scmccarthy/hanabi-conventions

A list of Hanabi strategies

Hanabi Conventions for The Hyphen-ated Group

Introduction & Purpose

Hanabi is a fantastic cooperative card game of logic and reasoning. Our group, started in February 2016 by a guy named Hyphen-ated, gets online games going regularly on the Hanab Live website. Everything doesn't always go perfectly, but we strive to constantly improve. Naturally, we have also built up a set of conventions that we all agree upon at the beginning of the game so that it is easier to understand what everyone else is doing. As the list of conventions got longer, we wanted to make sure that everything was completely documented in an official capacity.

Are you looking to start playing games with the group? Fantastic - we are always looking to welcome new players. Take 15 minutes and go over the beginner's guide so that you can get up to speed with the basics.

Have you found your way here from the Internet? That's fine too. Feel free to cherry-pick strategies for your own group, or even adopt the whole convention framework. We enjoy talking to other Hanabi players, so make sure to say hi in the Discord server as well. (Discord is a voice and text chat application that you can run in a browser.)

Note that while Hanabi is a 2 to 5 player game, our group generally only plays games with 3 to 5 players, since 2-player games can be quite boring. Thus, our strategies don't really apply to 2-player games; separate conventions are necessary for optimized play in that game type.

The List of Main Documents

• Level 1 - The Beginner's Guide
• Level 2 - The Learning Path
• Level ∞ - The Reference Document (All Conventions)

Other Quick Links

• The documents in this repository assume that you are already familiar with the basic rules of Hanabi. If you need to brush up on them, see this written explanation of the rules or watch this video explanation.
• The best place to play Hanabi online is at Hanab Live.
• There are also lots of players who play Hanabi online at Board Game Arena, although the user interface is not very good.
• Find other people to play with and discuss strategy with on the Hanabi Discord server. (Discord is a voice and text chat application that you can run in a browser.)