There's a deck of cards in 5 colors; each color has three cards valued 1, two 2s, two 3s, two 4s, and a single 5. From this total of 50 cards, each player draws a hand of four cards which is immediately turned around, Liar's Poker style. Everyone else gets to see your hand, but you do not. On your turn, you must take one of three actions: play a card from your hand, discard a card from your hand to place a "hint" chip in the group pot, or remove one of those hint chips to pass your turn and tell someone else something about their hand. The types of hints you may give are tightly constrained: you pick a single color or value present in another player's hand, then point to all the cards in their hand that match that value or color.
Cards must be played in ascending order. A perfect game would involve all cards numbered 1 through 5 being played in all five colors. But as this is a game of imperfect information, there are many pitfalls along the way. If the players discard all copies of a certain number in a certain color, there's no going back. If a player jumps over a 2 by, say, playing a 3 from hand on top of a 1, there's no going back. You're always going forward, always trying to pack the straights as tightly as you can.
Sometimes, you have to just play (or discard) a card blindly from your hand, without any information on what it actually is until you've made your decision. There's a mechanic for this as well. The team is allowed three mistakes -- playing illegal cards that are numbered too low to go on the stack of their color. With the fourth mistake, the team loses the game.
There are, of course, many ways you could cheat within these rules to compromise the game. When giving a hint to a friend, you could be: "These two cards are yellow. These TWO (pointing to one card in particular and winking) cards, THIS one and this other one, are your TWO yellow cards." You just have to have a group willing to play within the spirit of the rules, or able to enjoy a hollow, cheating victory.
But assuming all your teammates are on the level, there are a lot of interesting mind games to be played here. "Why is he giving me this particular clue right now?" "Which of my teammates needs help the most right now?" "If I count cards in the discard pile right now, can I figure out what this random green card I have is without getting another hint from anybody?" There's a lot of dimension to this simple rules set.
What the game doesn't have, which may or may not be a deal breaker for your gaming group, is a specific victory condition. You can blow yourselves up with four strikes and lose, but otherwise all you can do is play as many cards out of the possible 25 that you can. The rulebook provides tiers of success (the 18 points our five-person team got on my first play, for example, was a "crowd pleaser"), but you can't really "win" the game, short of attaining the virtually impossible 25 point maximum. Contrasted with other cooperative games that present the team a specific goal, this does make Hanabi feel more like a puzzle than a game.
Still, it seemed like a rather enjoyable puzzle to me. And one that would definitely take on different textures when played with different mixes of players. Hanabi is also refreshing among cooperative games in that it's harder for one player to dominate the strategy. For example, in games like Ghost Stories (also designed by Antoine Bauza) or Pandemic, it sometimes happens that a "leader" emerges to control all the players, telling people what to do on their turns and removing some of the fun individual agency from the game. A Hanabi leader could certainly exert pressure on players to "play a card this turn!" or "discard to get us a hint token!" But ultimately, the game's own rules constraining how hints are given keeps players from suggesting too much, and gives everyone a chance to do something.
It's quite possible my interest in Hanabi would wane as soon as I was part of a perfect game, but until then I suspect I'll look on it rather well. I give it a B+.
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