This week for class, we played the cooperative card game Hanabi. One of the most captivating parts about this game was how none of the people playing knew which cards were in their hand. In a solitaire like fashion, the goal was to play cards of a certain suit (in this case color) in order, from the lowest to highest number listed on the card. During the game, players could spend one of 8 hints to tell another player what kind of card they have. Unfortunately, this only extended to phrases like, “You have 3 blue cards.”, or “These two cards are 1’s.”. There was no “table talk” beyond this allowed. If a card that didn’t follow the proper order was played 4 times, everybody lost the game. People thankfully could choose to discard a card to regain a hint, but if it was a card that needed to be played, that trade may not be so wise.

I personally really enjoyed this game, but maybe not for the reasons other people did. I really made my fellow players frustrated because I gave them very little indication of what I was going to do, causing a hilarious amount of stress. Since it was a lot of peoples’ first time playing the game, they wanted to use a lot of table-talk, so I did the opposite. This dynamic caused some shouting, but more importantly, laughing.

I think the hardest part of this game was trying to inform people what kind of card they had, and make sure they remember that info. As far as leadership goes, I think this teaches being able to give proper advice to the people you lead, while also having trust in them to retain what you tell them. I think the person I know who would enjoy this game the most would be my parents, they would have definitely showed it to my family as kids had they known it existed.