Hanafuda: twelve months in forty-eight cards

The sequence runs from pine, plum and cherry through wisteria, iris and peony; then bush clover, susuki grass, chrysanthemum, maple, willow and paulownia. Animals, ribbons and other motifs distinguish cards within a month. The designs extend well beyond flowers alone.

Months and card categories

Many forms of play involve capturing cards of the same month from the table. Captured cards can form named combinations, or yaku. Categories such as bright cards, animal cards, ribbons and plain cards help identify them. Values and winning conditions depend on the particular game being played.

Capturing matching months

Nintendo’s two-player koi-koi rules make the sequence concrete. Play one card from the hand: capture it with a matching month on the table, or leave it there if none matches. Turn over one stock card and make the same check, then pass play to the opponent. In the illustrated example, a chrysanthemum ribbon card matches the chrysanthemum-and-cup card: both belong to September despite their different extra motifs.

Forming a yaku

Captured cards can then form a yaku. Bush clover with boar, maple with deer and peony with butterflies make “boar, deer, butterflies.” They belong to different months: matching a month captures cards, while a specified combination makes the yaku.

Choose a ruleset

Koi-koi is commonly a two-player game; hana-awase and hachi-hachi have their own three-player rules. Nintendo Museum’s introductory activity uses a separate simplified thirty-two-card set with four months removed. Its teaching rules should be understood as that specific version rather than a definition of every hanafuda game.

Continue or stop

Under these koi-koi rules, completing a yaku allows a player to end the round or call koi-koi and continue for more combinations. If the opponent completes a yaku first after that call, the caller scores nothing for the round. Choosing when to stop is therefore part of the game.

Early flower cards

European-style cards reached Japan in the sixteenth century, after which several local forms developed. Exhibition material from Omuta’s Miike Playing Card and History Museum traces a forty-eight-card form made up of twelve sets of four to the mid-eighteenth century. Edo makers produced hand-painted flower cards as well as woodblock-printed packs known as Musashino. Their designs and numbers of cards varied; an old flower-matching set is not necessarily the familiar modern pack of forty-eight.

Meiji standardisation

During the Meiji period, the popularity of hachi-hachi accompanied more standardised designs. Details in older Musashino packs, including verses on plain cards and a figure running through rain on the willow card, disappeared from common patterns, while makers continued some regional designs. Hanafuda therefore developed through changes in manufacture and play.

Nintendo’s manufacture

In Kyoto in 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi began making and selling hanafuda, the business from which Nintendo developed. Nintendo later automated the backing-paper process for Japanese playing cards in 1968.