Hanafuda

花札 / 18th century– / Style / Games and Play

Japanese cards that compress twelve months of flowers, birds, wind and moon into 48 sheets. Their bold flat-color stylization against black came out of a long history of redesigning the deck to slip past bans, and it was where Nintendo began.

Hanafuda — Hanafuda cards, ca. 1870 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Hanafuda cards, ca. 1870 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Hanafuda — A game of Koi-Koi in play (CC BY 2.0) · © Marcus Richert — A game of Koi-Koi in play (CC BY 2.0) · CC BY 2.0 · © Marcus Richert

At a glance

Visual cues

Monthly flower-and-bird designs
Black borders, flat color
Extreme simplification
Ribbon and animal combinations

Best used for

Extending a seasonal theme across a set of dozens with very few colors
Small handheld cards whose drawing must still read from across a table

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Dictionary entry

Type: Almost no lettering on the card, combination names sent to a rules sheet
Composition: Inside the black border, sky above and the month's plant below
Material: Flat black, red, purple and gold, form carried by contour alone
Caution: Scattering flowers as generic Japanese pattern ignores the monthly sets and produces a deck nobody can actually collect and play with.
Further study: the karuta bans and mutations / Nintendo's hanafuda manufacture / regional pattern variants

Related entries

Playing Card Design (トランプの意匠)Same Games and Play lineage.Compare Hanafuda and Playing Card Design
E-Sugoroku (絵双六)Same Games and Play lineage.Compare Hanafuda and E-Sugoroku

Cite this entry

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Link: https://indexstyle.org/styles/hanafuda
Markdown: [Hanafuda — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/hanafuda)
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