Games - Hanafuda

	Games - Hanafuda

Hanafuda (花札) is a Japanese gambling card game which evolved from Western playing cards. It is also known as hwatu in Korea.

History

Though refined card games were played in Japan by the nobility since its early eras, they were not commonly used for gambling, or played by the lower classes. This changed, however, in the 18th year of Tenmon (A.D. 1549) when Saint Francisco Xavier landed in Japan. The crew of his ship had carried a set of Hombre (48-card Portuguese) playing cards from Europe, and card games became very popular among the Japanese. When Japan closed off all contact with the Western world in 1633, foreign playing cards were banned.

Since the banned card games had been highly popular, an unknown gamer designed a card game known as "Unsun Karuta". These cards were decorated with Chinese art, depicting such subjects as Chinese warriors, weaponry, armor, and dragons. This deck consisted of 75 cards, and was not as popular as the Western card games had been simply because of the difficulty of becoming familiar with the system.

Through the rest of the Edo era through the Meiwa, Anei, and Tenmei eras (roughly 1765-1788), a game called "Mekuri Karuta" took "Unsun Karuta"'s place. Consisting of a 48-card deck divided into 4 sets of 12, it became wildly popular, and was one of the most common forms of gambling during this time. In fact, it became so commonly used for gambling that it was banned in 1791, during the Kansei Era.

Over the following few decades, several new card games were developed and subsequently banned due to the fact that they were used almost exclusively for gambling purposes. However, the government began to realize that some form of card game would always be played by the populace, and began to relax their laws against gambling.

The eventual result of all this was a game called Hanafuda, which combined traditional Japanese games with Western-style playing cards. By this point, however, card games were not as popular as they had been due to the past few decades of governmental repression.

In 1889, a man named Fusajiro Yamauchi
founded a company named Nintendo
Koppai for the purposes of producing and selling hand-crafted Hanafuda cards painted on the bark of the mulberry tree. Though it took awhile to catch on, soon the Yakuza began using Hanafuda cards in their gambling parlors, and card games became popular in Japan again.

Today, Hanafuda is commonly played in Hawaii and Korea, though under different names. It is a four-person game, and is often paired cross-table, though the Korean and Japanese versions are often played with three players.

The following rules are by no means official: there are many different games played with Hanafuda, and there are as many different variations as there are players.

Another way to spell it is Hanafura. This is how it is sometimes spelt in Hawaii.

Game play

Cards

There are twelve suits, representing months. Each is designated a flower, and each suit has four cards. Typically, there are two 'normal' cards worth one point, one ribbon-card worth ten points, and a third is a special worth 25 points (though the point values are often unnecessary and indeed arbitrary, as the most popular games only concern themselves with certain combinations of taken cards). This scoring scheme is the version played in Lana'i, Hawaii.

In Korea, the November and December suits are reversed.

Play

There are many scoring version and games you can play with this deck, such as Koi-Koi. The rules below, however, are basic rules for Koi-Koi, the most popular Hanafuda game in Japan and Korea.

Play begins with each player being dealt 7 cards, and the table receiving 6 cards face-up (for a three-player game -- for two players, each gets ten cards and the table gets eight, and for four you deal five to each player and eight to the table). On a player's turn, they may match any one card on the table with one in their hands, and take both cards into their point pile. Card matching is by suit, and any of the four can match each. The exception is November's Wild, which will match any card in the deck in some games (When this is used, there will be two unmatching cards that will now be paired.)

The player then draws 1 card, which they put face down on the table. If this card matches any in the table's draw, then they get to keep both. If a player can make no matches, then they play one card by putting it on the table. The player then draws one card and plays it immediately in the same manner he played the card chosen from his hand. Unlike Western card games, play goes counterclockwise and starts with the dealer.

When a player makes one of the combinations below, the points are scored, and the player is given the opportunity to stop or to keep going (though some groups institute a minimum score for stopping). The first time a player continues, one point is added to his score. The second time, his score is doubled. The third, tripled. If he makes it to the fourth or later, it is likewise quadrupled or quintupled. The downside to this, however, is that if someone else makes a scoring match, they can choose to stop, in which case the other scoring player will lose all of his potential points.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Hanafuda ]

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