Hello BGA Hanabi experts!
I typically play 2 player Hanabi with either Avalanche of Colors or Black Powder with a few RL friends. Recently, we've been trying to raise the challenge by playing both Black Powder and Avalanche simultaneously. So far I've found that the hand size of 5 cards, or perhaps the number of clue tokens starting at 8, is just a little too tight. In a normal 2 player Black Powder or Avalanche game I find that we generally have to work hard but we can do well on most deals if we play very carefully, and if we mess up by more than 1 or 2 points it's our fault for communicating poorly. But if we try to play with both turned on at once then it seems like we really need to get lucky with the order of the deck-- otherwise we inevitably end up with too many unique cards like 5s cluttering up our hands and not enough clues to survive until we can get ourselves unstuck.
I wanted to see if anyone else had thoughts or experience to share. We mostly play online here, but on the rare occasions when I'm playing in-person with friends we'd be up for trying out some rules variations to make this particular combination work better, like expanding the hand size to 6 or adding 2 clue tokens. Anyone think that sounds like an interesting road to explore, or would that break the game by making it too easy? I really enjoy the challenge of deciphering semi-ambiguous clues, so I want to pile on the complexity if possible. But I don't so much love getting halfway through a game and saying, well, yup, our hands filled up with (non-black) 5s before we got enough 1s and 2s and there's nothing clever we can do to get around that.
Thanks for sharing any ideas!
(This is my first post on the BGA forums, so please be kind if I make any etiquette mistakes!)
I typically play 2 player Hanabi with either Avalanche of Colors or Black Powder with a few RL friends. Recently, we've been trying to raise the challenge by playing both Black Powder and Avalanche simultaneously. So far I've found that the hand size of 5 cards, or perhaps the number of clue tokens starting at 8, is just a little too tight. In a normal 2 player Black Powder or Avalanche game I find that we generally have to work hard but we can do well on most deals if we play very carefully, and if we mess up by more than 1 or 2 points it's our fault for communicating poorly. But if we try to play with both turned on at once then it seems like we really need to get lucky with the order of the deck-- otherwise we inevitably end up with too many unique cards like 5s cluttering up our hands and not enough clues to survive until we can get ourselves unstuck.
I wanted to see if anyone else had thoughts or experience to share. We mostly play online here, but on the rare occasions when I'm playing in-person with friends we'd be up for trying out some rules variations to make this particular combination work better, like expanding the hand size to 6 or adding 2 clue tokens. Anyone think that sounds like an interesting road to explore, or would that break the game by making it too easy? I really enjoy the challenge of deciphering semi-ambiguous clues, so I want to pile on the complexity if possible. But I don't so much love getting halfway through a game and saying, well, yup, our hands filled up with (non-black) 5s before we got enough 1s and 2s and there's nothing clever we can do to get around that.
Thanks for sharing any ideas!
(This is my first post on the BGA forums, so please be kind if I make any etiquette mistakes!)
