Week 08 - Reflection

During class, I got to play the card game “Hanabi” in which players are tasked with building a firework through a series of cooperative tasks. There was no real reason I chose this game other than the cover art looked kind of cool. Little did I know that the game would require a lot of initial input on my end to get started. Our group, consisting of four players including myself, all sat around my desk to read the rules. I usually never read the rules of a board or card game, but this time I was glad I did. There were a lot of moving parts, and it took the four of us to start the game. Even after starting the game, we consulted the rulebook for more information or to quell our thoughts.

From Nathan Atlice’s “Playing Card Platform”, I could tell this game was a master at concealing and displaying information. In his first chapter, Atlice argues that card players are commonly faced against one another in a shared space, allowing them to read their cards. However, Hanabi flips this on its end by sharing the same play space you would find in a typical card game night in your dad’s garage but instead showing your opponents your cards. With a cooperative game design in mind, Hanabi forces everyone to show their hand and work together to make a series of fireworks before they run out of tokens.

As a game, Hanabi takes the competitive aspect of card games and inverts it to form a cooperative experience in which you must help your neighbor build the firework. I think what I loved about the game is that at first glance it sets you up in a play space like a competitive card game in which you’re seated across your opponent. You’re expected to draw your cards and conceal your hand, however, it’s the complete opposite. In the beginning, it tricked us because we were so used to concealing our own hand rather than exposing it. In the words of Atlice, “these games undermine centuries of playing card convention by forcing players to reveal to their cards to their opponents, though at drastically different tempos.”

Hanabi seems easy compared to the Watch it Played video on Alien: Fate of the Nostromo. As a group, we may have struggled to understand the rules but came together as a team in the end. Alien: Fate of the Nostromo requires so much more cooperation compared to the Hanabi. What’s special about the Alien board game is that each card the player is given is a character from the film with a set of certain strengths and weaknesses. Each player must work to their advantages and disadvantages together to complete objectives. If not, then each player will die and fail the game. In a way, both games draw similarities to a cooperative experience, but each goes about it in a different way. Beyond the extra cards and tokens, Aliens emulates Hanabi’s core cooperative experience by forcing players to use their actions wisely to win the game through communication and different tempo beats.

While it could be said that the Aliens board game is drastically different, there may be a lot more similarities found in their game design.