Hanamikoji.

I’ve owned the small two-player game Hanamikoji for probably seven or eight years now, and played it maybe twice when I first got it, but I set it aside and did what I unfortunately do with a lot of games I own but didn’t get as a review copy – I forgot about it. It popped up recently on Board Game Arena, so I got to play it a bunch of times, since a full game takes less than ten minutes, and I was reminded how elegant and great it is. It’s a capture-the-flag game, like Battle Line or Riftforce, with a simple scoring method and a strict set of possible actions that forces you to try to figure out what your opponent might be trying to do.

The theme of Hanamikoji isn’t that relevant except for the art, mostly by the wonderful Taiwanese artist Maisherly, who has also provided art for Walking in Burano, Realm of Sand, and Mystery of the Temples. The game itself is so simple you could make your own version with a bunch of index cards, although I would say just buy the game since it’s only about $17: The game has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 5 in seven different colors. The 2s come in purple, red, and yellow; 3s in blue and orange; 4s in green; and 5s in pink. A card’s frequency matches its value, so there are 21 cards in the deck.

Before each round, you shuffle all cards, remove one without showing it to either player, and then deal six cards to each player. The first player must draw one card and then take one of the four possible actions, which they will then not be able to take for the rest of that round. The second player does the same, and the play goes back and forth, with each player drawing one card and taking a previously unused (by them) action, until each player has had four turns.

In between the players sits a row of geisha cards, one in each color, and players will play cards to their side by the matching geisha to try to win each geisha’s favor with gifts. The four possible actions are to reserve a card to be played to the table at the end of the round (so a final, secret move); to discard two cards from your hands so they’re out of the round entirely; to present your opponent with three cards, where they choose one to play to their side, leaving two for you to play to your side; and to present your opponent with two pairs of cards, where they choose one to play and you then play the other. At the end of the round, you see who has more cards on their side of each of the geishas. Whoever has more cards on their side gains that geisha’s favor, and if the players have the same number on both sides, the favor doesn’t move. If one player gets the favor of four geishas, or gets the favor of three geishas worth a total of 11 or more (for example, the 5 and both 3s), they win.

If, as is most common, you complete the first round and neither player wins, the start player switches and you play a new round, but you retain the favor you won in the previous round, so if, say, you had the favor of the purple 2 geisha, and each player plays a purple card to the table, you would keep her favor. Play continues until someone meets either victory condition. If both conditions are achieved in the same round, the player with the 11+ points is the winner.

There are two tremendous strategic bits to Hanamikoji – when to use which actions, and predicting what your opponent might do. The order of your actions is entirely up to you, and in some sense depends on the cards you get. You may want to save the discard action until second or third, when you might already know some cards are worthless to you either way (e.g., the blue 3 geisha is already decided either way with two cards on one side, so the last card won’t change anything), but saving it till last might cause you to discard a card that would help you. Many players like to use the three-card action with three cards of the same color, since no matter what you get two and your opponent gets one, but that cedes the possibility of gaining control of two geishas rather than just one. The little decisions here go on and on in a way I find incredibly satisfying – like chess, but on a smaller scale.

Anticipating your opponent’s choices is, of course, inherent in lots of games with direct interaction, and here it comes into play in two ways. One is just trying to infer what geishas they might be trying to win, so you can choose where to parry and where to put cards to win your own geishas. You also need to understand their thinking, or at least try to do so, when choosing which cards to present to them in the three-card and two-pair actions, so that they’ll choose what you want them to choose. You can’t do this perfectly, since the card draws are random and you don’t see the cards they reserve or discard, but you can at least think about the odds of different scenarios. I love this part of the game, because, again, it’s a bit like chess, but with smaller trees of possible outcomes and a little randomness to help balance out small gaps in skill levels.

I’m due to revise my list of my favorite two-player games, and I have at least two newish ones in the basement to try (The Hunt & Broken and Beautiful, both from 2023) before I do so, but I think Hanamikoji has earned its way (back) on to the list. It’s so easy to teach, highly portable, has lovely art, and seems to be highly replayable, everything I’d want in a true two-player experience.