Hanabi: grand feux (new edition)

[Vvnx]

I understand the purpose of changing UI design is to keep closing to reality game. But there's conflict exists:

1. Surely the mistake counts should not be like this. We all know it should be 3 tokens, instead of something changed on board. It could not be happen in reality at all.
2. I don't know what size of screen or web browser is required, to display a full desktop. Currently the discard area and my handcard/name is not fully displayed. Also when I switch to "stacked" mode, only 3 players could be shown in screen. Indeed some games requires to scroll the screen for a full view, however I don't expect it happens in Hanabi as it could be better.
3. The turn of card on partners. I do agree it's similar to reality, however, we are playing it in a 2D environment here, which makes it a little hard to realize. It's not a very big problem, but a hint on UI would be better.

Hoping there would be a revise soon, so we won't lose too many Hanabi players here

[Lara8818]

When Carcassonne was updated recently, there was an option in Preferences to go back to the old 'look'. I immensely appreciated that.

From what I can tell, nothing in the actual gameplay or options has changed for Hanabi - the changes are purely cosmetic - so I don't see why there would be any harm if, say, Player A has the old version and Player B has the new one. They can still each have the layout they prefer on their own screens, while playing the same game together.

I'm bummed particularly because I saw the news about the upcoming expansions a while ago and was looking forward to exploring new dimensions of the game...but not at the same time as getting used to a much less intuitive layout as well.

(I'm playing stacked but still have to zoom way in for the game board to be close to readable...which has the side effect of making the player info and activity log much larger than necessary and taking up a lot of extra space.)

(Also, is 'avalanche of colors' the new way of saying 'multicolor'? Not a problem, I just don't want to join a table without understanding the rules.) (edit: apparently so, but it would have been nice to have a way to find that out beyond barging into a table and asking.)

[ExpendableEnsign]

The interface has been totally upgraded.

Downgraded.

1. Cards are way bigger and easier to read.

Cards are way bigger and take up immense space on the screen for no good reason. Clue tokens also take up a huge amount of unnecessary space. Combined with the round-the-table arrangement, this makes it necessary to scroll the screen to see more than 2 players at once, which is utterly horrid.

The absolute priority for a game in which we need to see other players' hands is to be able to see all of them at once. Scrolling the screen constantly just makes the game unbearable.

I'd suggest you check your server logs on how many games are being aborted because of interface issues and because it's just too awful to play.

[squirrel1988]

I believe that hanabi is one of the most played game (if not the most) played game on BGA which also has frequent and regular players who subscribed to premium membership.

The fact that you guys are ignoring all the comments that are being made on this "NEW" and "IMPROVED" hanabi is VERY DISAPPOINTING because obviously you guys are IGNORING how we all feel about it.
so I am seriously questioning what your PRIORITIES are.
"Happiness of the players" VS "What you think is an improvement"

Especially during the times like this, when people are extremely grateful for this online platform to play boardgames and conversation. I hope you guys realized from all the posts by the players that this is not working out.

I am sorry for whoever came up with this new design and setting but it was really a waste of money and time.
the fact that nothing is being done about this mess and us consistently getting ignored with "please change to the old setting" does NOT make you look good at all.

and you are constantly ONLY making "upgrade" "improved" comments
that is just more waste of time and money i hope you are aware of that.
AND YOU GUYS ARE NOT LISTENING

Why not stop spending time and money trying to improve what is a failure and KEEP THE REGULAR PLAYERS AND PLAYERS WHO ARE SUBSCRIBERS WHO ARE GIVING YOU MONEY?
Take a look at cancelled subscriptions and number of games and number of regular players of hanabi playing the game.

A lot of people are saying they will switch to .live. is that what you wish?

PLEASE STOP IGNORING US AND DO SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE

[Tengfred]

Literally unplayable on phone. Bring back old interface!

[KeithLangley]

Hopefully you didn't delete the files for the old version; it seems this one is not going to fly.

[selquest]

Sorry guys, but this re-design missed. The artwork is pretty, but the other problems with the layout outweigh it pretty badly.

First, the around-the-table view is so much less effective that I can't imagine anyone is using it over the stacked view. I get that it's trying to more completely simulate the tabletop experience, but it's kind of simulating all the worst parts of it: having to search all over the table to find relevant information and not being able to see it all at the same time. At the very least, I'd recommend making Stacked the default. There are other layout concerns I have on the around-the-table view, but ultimately they're irrelevant because I just won't use that view.

In the Stacked View, after playing a few games with a group that has played quite a few games of Hanabi on the old interface, we had the following feedback: (Desktop version, in browser)

1. The main thing is just wasted real estate, especially vertically. We like the bigger cards in theory, but with a 4K monitor I should not have to scroll (or zoom to 80%) to see 4 rows of cards.
   - Related: The stacked view falling back to the around-the-table view when the window was narrowed was very disappointing. Maybe some things should be moved around to decrease the minimum allowable width, but the around-the-table view seemed even less desirable in a narrower layout, so I'm just not sure what the reasoning was here.
2. I like the effect of the background changing to red on a mis-play, BUT there definitely needs to be another indicator on screen to accompany it. Something like the explosion tokens from the previous interface. We didn't realize what was happening with the background until we found this forum thread.
3. Take the Used Clue Tokens off the screen. There's really no reason to show them, and right now the significance of a clue token moving from the white box to the black one (or vice versa) is not immediately apparent.
4. The icons in the discard pile should be shown in the corresponding color, or otherwise more clearly associated with the colors. I know they're supposed to provide high-contrast accessibility for those who have trouble distinguishing the colors, so I'm not sure exactly what to suggest here - but until there are discarded cards, the icons aren't sufficiently recognizable.
5. The verbose clue giving is a bit clunky. It works, but it seems like it would be better to have a more succinct way of choosing the type of clue. We've had a few mis-clicks with wording like "These 2 cards are red" when the player intended to give a number clue - admittedly this is more of a reading comprehension error, but it does highlight some room for improvement. It was a little easier to reliably choose between a color or number clue in the old interface.
6. The background image is either mis-aligned or isn't scaling correctly when playing the 6-stack variant. The stacks hang off the top and the right side of the background in a weird way that was presumably unintentional.
7. Initial reactions to the font used for the numbers on the new cards were pretty bad. That aversion did seem to lessen over the course of a couple of games, but especially the 3s and 1s just seem off.

With some more work I suspect this re-design will end up being a good thing overall - as I said, I do like the artistic touches - but for the moment I'm sorry to say that we found it a pretty clear step backward.

[Faranim]

I also do not like this new interface. The method of giving clues is NOT intuitive at all. Also, you can't even give a null color clue anymore (e.g. 'you have no red'). You can at least give null number clues (e.g. 'you have no 4s') for some reason though.

When we play in real life, we use strips of paper with arrows printed on them so it's clear which card will be next to discard. I realize this isn't part of the actual rules, but 99% of players play this way on BGA, with an assumption/understanding that players will discard from the right side of their hand (oldest unmarked card).

So, perhaps simply adding some arrows to the table to help indicate this would make it easier to understand, example (arrows were drawn by me):

HanabiConvention.jpg (252.6 KiB) Viewed 1462 times

Overall, the cards are way too big, and the items are spread way too far apart. Even on a desktop computer, 5 players in Stacked mode requires vertical scrolling to see everyone's hands. There is just so much dead/wasted space on the screen.

[Negeator]

Thanks for taking the time to update my favorite game on this site, I really appreciate the effort put into this. However, as many have pointed out this is a serious downgrade. Some of the issues I've noticed at a quick glance:

• In around table layout, I have to scroll to see the player's cards below the table. Even on my large 1080p and 4k monitors with the window fully expanded.

• In stacked layout, all the board elements are crammed into the top-left corner. 3/4 of the screen is just empty space. In the old layout the board elements were left aligned but took up most of the vertical space

• The discard numbers are tiny compared to before.

• Layout doesn't seem to be friendly with smaller window sizes

• I feel that the old scheme of hinting was more intuitive. Having menu options that tell you what will happen may be helpful for newcomers, but I actually feel less confident I picked the right option when choosing from a list of text versus just clicking a number/color I want to give.

• In table layout the cards are rotated around the table, so if I hint the right-most card (from my perspective) across the table, that will be that player's left-most card (from their perspective). In contast, in stacked layout if I hint the right-most card for that player that will be their right-most card. I am concerned that mixing players with these two layouts will lead to confusion, since we employ strategies such as always discard the right-most unhinted card. Not sure if this will be an issue but I'd recommend making the original stack layout the default so I don't have this issue with friends that are new to the game and don't know to change the layout to match mine.

• Names are harder to read. My name appeared as bright orange/yellow on a bright red background. The old design would have had solid red text on a standard white background which is much more readable

• Minor, but the area for used hint tokens is just a solid black color and is not pleasant to look at

Please let us go back to the old design, it worked great for me unlike the new one which honestly makes me not want to play. I did like the new card images and general art direction, so if it were me I'd revert back to the original design but maybe implement the new card design/aesthetics.

[Game 56]

Bonjour, problème avec le nouveau hanabi , pour informer les coéquipiers ce n'est pas intuitif et trop petit . Il manquerait juste un petit panneau de contrôle
pour donner les indices . Merci pour votre travail