MEET IT IN 30 SECONDS
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Hana-awase uses a forty-eight-card hanafuda deck to match months and score captured cards and yaku. Nintendo’s three-player rules provide the example here, with explicit comparisons to Oishi Tengudo’s version.
Hana-awase is a hanafuda game in which players capture table cards by matching their month, then score both captured cards and named combinations called yaku. This page follows Nintendo’s published three-player version; other versions differ in values and optional rules.
The deck has forty-eight cards, four for each month. January–June use pine, plum, cherry, wisteria, iris, and peony; July–December use bush clover, pampas grass, chrysanthemum, maple, willow, and paulownia. Cards of a month can match even when their images and values differ.
Nintendo values the five bright cards at twenty each, nine tane cards at ten, ten ribbon cards at five, and twenty-four plain cards at one. Together they total 264 points. Cards of one month need not share a value: the cherry curtain and plain cherry cards still match.
Each player draws a card. Order by month, earliest to latest, to assign dealer, dōni, and biki. Compare card values for a tied month, drawing again if still tied. Dōni sits to the dealer’s right and biki to the left; turns follow that counterclockwise order. Return these cards to the deck before dealing.
Each player receives seven concealed cards; six cards lie face up on the table and twenty-one remain in the draw pile. Deal four to each hand and three to the table, then three to each hand and three more to the table. If all four cards of one month appear initially on the table, Nintendo calls for a complete redeal.
Play one card from your hand. If table cards share its month, capture your card with one matching table card; otherwise leave your card on the table. Keep captured cards separate from unplayed hand cards. Ordinary yaku are made from the captured collection.
When two table cards share the played or drawn card’s month, choose one to capture. That choice can affect later yaku. When three matching table cards are present, the fourth card instead captures the complete month.
Consider a position showing only the cards relevant to a choice. Your collection contains the peony and maple blue ribbons. On the table are the chrysanthemum blue ribbon, worth five, its sake cup, worth ten, and a plain wisteria card among other cards. Playing a one-point plain chrysanthemum card lets you choose one of the two chrysanthemum matches.
Taking the cup adds eleven card points. Taking the ribbon adds only six, but completes Blue Ribbons, worth forty. Assume your captured cards include neither the cherry curtain nor the moon, so the cup forms no viewing combination immediately. Card points and combinations can pull a choice in different directions. This illustrates a trade-off, not a guaranteed winning strategy: later draws and opponents’ play remain unknown.
If three cards of one month are on the table, playing the fourth captures all four. For example, a pine ribbon played onto the pine crane and two plain pine cards takes the whole month, worth twenty-seven card points in this version.
After resolving the hand card, reveal the top card of the draw pile and apply the same matching rule: capture when a month matches, otherwise leave it on the table. Only after both steps does the next player take a turn. Under the basic rules, yaku are scored when all hands are exhausted.
Continue by choosing the blue ribbon. Move your plain chrysanthemum and the table’s blue ribbon into your collection; the cup stays on the table. Only then reveal the draw card. Suppose it is the ten-point wisteria tane card: capture it with the table’s one-point plain wisteria, then pass the turn.
This adds six plus eleven, or seventeen card points, while completing Blue Ribbons. Choosing the cup first would add twenty-two with the same draw, but leave that combination incomplete. These are the turn’s additions, not the player’s entire C total. Other hand cards and previously captured cards are omitted from this focused example.
The round ends after all three seven-card hands have been played. Add captured card values, then calculate yaku. Nintendo normally uses twelve rounds but permits an agreed three, six, or nine. Compare accumulated net scores at the end.
Five Brights consists of the pine crane, cherry curtain, pampas moon, willow Ono no Michikaze, and paulownia phoenix, worth 200 in Nintendo’s version. Four Brights is the four excluding willow, worth sixty; it is not added on top of Five Brights.
The inscribed pine, plum, and cherry ribbons form Red Ribbons; peony, chrysanthemum, and maple ribbons form Blue Ribbons. Each is worth forty. Excluding the willow ribbon, seven ribbons score forty and six score thirty; Seven Ribbons replaces Six Ribbons.
The bush-clover boar, maple deer, and peony butterflies form Boar–Deer–Butterfly, worth twenty. The wisteria, iris, and bush-clover ribbons form Grass Ribbons, also twenty. The former matches three particular animals; the latter uses ribbons from three specified months.
Cherry curtain with the chrysanthemum sake cup makes Flower Viewing; the pampas moon with the cup makes Moon Viewing, each twenty. All three make Nomi, worth thirty, which replaces those two combinations.
Pine crane, plum bird, and cherry curtain form Omote Sugawara, worth thirty, but excluded when Four or Five Brights is held. Pine crane, moon, and paulownia phoenix form Matsu–Kiri–Bōzu, worth twenty. Complete four-card sets of wisteria, paulownia, or willow make Fuji-shima, Kiri-shima, or Ame-shima, each twenty.
The deck’s 264 card points divided among three players gives a baseline of eighty-eight. Each player first subtracts eighty-eight from captured card points. Each yaku is then paid by both opponents, while the player also pays each opponent’s yaku.
With your card points C, your total yaku Y, and your opponents’ yaku Y1 and Y2, the net score is C−88+2Y−Y1−Y2. The three net scores should sum to zero, providing a useful check that no opponent’s yaku has been omitted.
Nintendo explicitly allows simultaneously formed yaku to be added, subject to its stated replacements and exclusions. First calculate C from the physical cards captured, counting each card’s value once. Then identify the combinations for Y. A card can participate in more than one combination without its card value being counted again; combinations that replace one another are still excluded.
Suppose a captured collection contains twelve cards: all five brights—the pine crane, cherry curtain, moon, willow Ono no Michikaze, and paulownia phoenix—plus the chrysanthemum cup, and one plain card from each of those six months. They form six same-month pairs. The card total is five times twenty, plus ten for the cup and six plain cards: C = 116.
The collection makes Five Brights (200), Matsu–Kiri–Bōzu (twenty), and Nomi (thirty), giving Y = 250. Four Brights is replaced by Five Brights, and Nomi replaces Flower and Moon Viewing. The crane, moon, and phoenix can still form Matsu–Kiri–Bōzu even though they also belong to Five Brights. The net result is 528 minus the two opponents’ yaku totals; their combinations must still be paid.
The previous example derives combinations and one player’s net score from twelve cards. A separate settlement example shows all three players paying one another: A has 120 card points and forty yaku points, B eighty and twenty, and C sixty-four and none. The formula gives A +92, B −8, and C −84, summing to zero.
After a round, the highest net scorer becomes the next dealer, with dōni to the right and biki to the left. Players need not change seats. Play begins with the new dealer while accumulated scores carry forward.
Page two of Oishi Tengudo’s guide values Five Brights at 100, Nomi at forty, and each shima at ten. Nintendo uses 200, thirty, and twenty. Tengudo also replaces an initial table group of three or more cards of one month, returning them to the pile before replenishing the table; Nintendo’s basic procedure allows three to remain.
Nintendo lists optional opening-hand rules. Seven one-point cards earn thirty from each opponent; six in a seven-card hand earn twenty. Reveal all seven in the former case, but only the six one-point cards in the latter. Agree on using these options before the deal.
Under these options, exposed cards remain part of their owner’s hand but can also be matched by the other players as table cards. If the owner loses the entire hand this way, their turn consists only of revealing and resolving a draw card.
Nintendo also lists fuke, making the round a draw if anyone’s captured card points total twenty or less. Under Ame-shima yaku-nagashi, the player collecting all four November cards counts card values without yaku. These options also require agreement before play.
Seisen Nihon Kokugo Daijiten separates two senses of hana-awase: comparing flowers, sometimes with poems, in opposing groups; and matching hanafuda months and scoring cards and yaku.
The dictionary cites Morisada Mankō, dated 1837–53, for the card-game sense. A Japan Playing Card Museum research article quotes an 1819 Osaka prohibition naming Hana-awase and noting Musashino as an alternative. Such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century terminology could describe card types more broadly than one modern game.
The Ministry of Justice Research Section’s 1921 gambling survey describes a game called “八十八の馬鹿花”: forty-eight cards, seven-card hands for three players, six table cards, and a baseline of eighty-eight from the total 264 card points, without yaku. It separately describes “横浜花,” adding opening-hand and captured-card combinations. Point-only and combination-scoring games thus coexisted in this record.
Japan Playing Card Museum traces police use of hanafuda for flower cards used in gambling from early Meiji, with the name becoming more widespread in late Meiji and adopted by makers and rule books. Today hanafuda names the deck, while hana-awase can name a particular game played with it. Nintendo and Oishi Tengudo’s rule sheets preserve concrete differences.
Month determines a match. A bright and a plain card of the same month can match.
Reveal the top draw card and resolve its month match before the next player takes a turn.
Two hundred. Tengudo’s one hundred belongs to a different published version.
Because both opponents pay your yaku total, while you also pay each of theirs.
Nintendo uses 200, thirty, and twenty; Tengudo uses 100, forty, and ten.
Count the physical values once: five brights total 100, the cup ten, and six plain cards six. The yaku are Five Brights 200 plus Matsu–Kiri–Bōzu 20 and Nomi 30. Their stated replacements exclude Four Brights and the two viewing sets.
The chrysanthemum pair adds six and the wisteria pair eleven: seventeen new card points and a completed forty-point Blue Ribbons set. Choosing the cup would add twenty-two with that draw but leave Blue Ribbons incomplete, illustrating different immediate and combination goals.