hanafuda

hanafuda is a japanese card deck. various games can be played with them.

the cards feature images of flowers, animals, and a few other symbols; but overall, they don’t have any markings such as a suit, number, or color, unlike western decks of cards. rather, cards are organized by the fact that they share the same type of imagery, such as pine trees, or wisterias.

each month is represented by four cards of various types & point values:

• kasu - “junk” plain cards (1 point)
• tanzaku - ribbon cards (5 points)
• tane - animal cards (10 points)
• hikari - “bright” cards (20 points)

learning the cards

before learning any games you can play with hanafuda, you need to be able to identify each card with its month, as well as its type of card and its value. below is an enumeration of the cards and their values. note the images used below are used licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and are from wikipedia.

month	flower	hikari (20)	tane (10)	tanzaku (5)	kasu (1)
january	pine
february	plum blossom
march	cherry blossom
april	wisteria
may	iris
june	peony
july	bush cloer
august	susuki grass
september	chrysanthemum
october	maple
november	willow
december	paulownia

hikari (bright) cards

one of the easiest ways to get started is to first memorize the 5 hikari (bright) cards:

card	month	name	mnenomic
	january	the crane and sun	two major elements; a rising sun and a bird makes it special. also the sun is bright.
	march	the curtain	i always imagine the curtains are decorations for a festive night - also decoration are bright
	august	the full moon	we all know the full moon is bright! and full moons are often special.
	november	the rain man	the rain man is the only human in the deck. he is “bright” because he brought an umbrella.
	december	the chinese phoenix	the phoenix rules over all others birds. its the king. and thus its special/bright.

tane (animal) cards

• after that, everything that looks like an animal, is an animal. this also includes the butteryfly.
• the exceptions:
  • the eight plank bridge
  • the sake cup

tanzaku (ribbon) cards

the tanzaku cards are split up into three groups:

• red tanazaku
• blue tanazaku
• poetry tanazaku

kasu (“dregs”) cards

the kasu are the rest of the cards that don’t fit into the other ones, they are all plain, and don’t feature any animals, ribbons, or other major motifs. the one exception:

lightning card

The lightning card is an exception: it doesn’t look plain but is a kasu (1-point) card. some people play with it as a wildcard.

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