What is hanafuda?

Where the name comes from

The word is written 花札 and read hana-fuda: hana means flower and fuda means card, the same fuda you meet in the names of the card kinds. In English the cards are usually called flower cards.^[10] Nintendo, which still makes them, notes that they are also called hana-karuta (花かるた), “flower karuta”.^[1] Karuta, the older Japanese word for playing cards, comes from the Portuguese carta, “card”: playing cards first reached Japan with Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century.^[11]

The deck has had other names too. Hana-awase (花合わせ, “matching flowers”) is both the name of a game and an old name for the cards, and early printed decks were sold as Musashino, after the plain around Edo, today’s Tokyo. The design used today is called hachi-hachi-bana, after the game hachi-hachi that made it popular. In Japanese you “draw” or “strike” hanafuda to play (花札を引く, 花札を打つ).^[6] In Korea the same cards are hwatu (花鬪, “flower battle”).^[10]

The deck in brief

A deck has twelve suits, one for each month, and each suit has four cards showing the same plant: pine for January, plum for February, cherry for March and so on, to paulownia for December.^[1] There are no numbers or suit signs, so the plant is how you tell the months apart. Learn these twelve and you can sort any hand.

Each card is also one of four kinds, told apart by what is drawn with the plant. Five lights show a large subject such as the crane or the full moon. Nine tane cards show an animal or an object, ten tanzaku show a paper strip hung in the branches, and the plains show the plant alone. In the older games each kind has a value, and across the deck the values add up to 264.^[6]

The kinds matter in the matching games because the scoring sets, yaku, are built from them. In Koi-Koi they include the lights together, the boar, deer and butterflies, the three red poem ribbons, or simply five tane, five tanzaku or ten plains, and Koi-Koi scores those sets and ignores the card values. The cards themselves are small, about 5.4 by 3.2 cm, but thicker and stiffer than Western cards, and their backs are usually plain black or red. Only one card shows a person: the man with the umbrella on November’s light.^[10] You can see all 48 cards month by month, with their names and what each picture shows.

How the matching games work

Most hanafuda games belong to the fishing family: you capture cards from the table by matching them.^[13] In Koi-Koi as this game deals it, each player gets eight cards, eight more lie face up on the table and the other 24 form a face-down draw pile. On your turn you play a card from your hand. If a table card is of the same month, you take both; if none is, your card stays on the table. Then you turn over the top card of the draw pile and do the same with it.^[2]

When two table cards match, you choose which one to take, and when three match, you take all four. Captured cards lie face up in front of you, and what they make together is what scores. In Koi-Koi, a player who completes a yaku decides at the end of that turn whether to stop and score (shōbu, often written “shobu”) or to call koi-koi and play on for more, at the risk that the opponent scores first. The rules walk through a whole turn, and the yaku page lists every scoring set.

Games played with hanafuda

Hanafuda is a deck, not a game, much as a Western pack serves for both bridge and poker. These are the games you are most likely to meet in Japan.

A short history

Playing cards came to Japan with Portuguese traders in the middle of the sixteenth century, and Japanese makers were soon copying the 48-card Portuguese pack: the first Japanese-made cards, Tenshō karuta (Tensho karuta).^[11] Card gambling was banned again and again under the shoguns, and by the late eighteenth century 48-card flower decks were being printed and sold. The traditional story is that they were designed to slip past the bans, with old poems written on some cards so that they would pass for harmless poetry cards. Other accounts trace them to a refined pastime instead: one printed in 1890 says flower cards began in the Kyōhō era (1716–1736), at first as a pastime of the women of samurai households.^[6]

The Meiji government allowed flower cards again in the mid-1880s. Around then, it is said, the figure on November’s light was redrawn as the calligrapher Ono no Michikaze, and by the 1890s the hachi-hachi deck had become the standard.^[6] In 1889 Fusajirō Yamauchi began making hanafuda in Kyoto; his business became Nintendo.^[5] Koi-Koi came later still, a game of the twentieth century.^[8] Meanwhile the cards travelled with the Japanese to Korea, Hawaii and Palau. The history of hanafuda tells the whole story, from the Portuguese pack to the 1902 card tax.

How to start playing

You need no cards and no experience. A good order is:

1. Learn the twelve plants. The month grid above is enough to begin; after a few games you will know them. The card list has every card by month.
2. Read the rules of Koi-Koi, then keep the yaku list at hand while you play. The table highlights the cards you can match, a help you can switch off.
3. Play the computer. A practice game against the computer needs no account.
4. Invite a friend. To play a friend online, sign in with Google, create a room and send the invite link.

A match here is six or twelve rounds, as you choose, and ends early if a player runs out of points; Nintendo’s rules play twelve.^[2]