Missing information, secret codes, and obstructed communication 

A hand of cards is a beautiful thing. Here’s this funny little pile of information, all for you, away from the prying eyes of those pesky other players. It’s up to you and you alone to use it correctly and ensure victory for you or your team.

Sometimes an interesting mechanic arrives when a designer turns a truth like that one on its head. Hanabi by Antoine Bauza is a cooperative card game that presumably started with the statement, “fuck it: backwards hands.” Each player has a hand of cards numbered 1-5 across five suits, and has to simply play one card per turn in pursuit of collectively playing the cards of each suit in numerical order.

You can’t see your own cards, but get a full view of everyone else’s. It’s no longer up to you and you alone to use the information contained in your cards, which means you are now entirely beholden to other players’ advice when deciding what cards to play. You have full agency over what to do with your cards despite missing the critical information about what’s actually on them. It’s an interesting game that I barely even like playing, and I think part of that is because of its aversion to the thematic and narrative implications of that mechanic. 

Hanabi is themed as a game about putting on a fireworks show. It’s irrelevant. Sure, there are fireworks on the cards, and a little fuse that ticks down when you make an oopsie, but that’s about where the flavor ends.

In reality, Hanabi is a legacy game about developing and implementing a secret code over the course of many playthroughs. While playing, you can only communicate verbally by taking your turn to point at specific cards in someone’s hand and tell them either “these are all [suit] cards” or “these are all [rank] cards.”

If someone was holding the hand above, you could give these clues:

• These are both ones (while pointing at the blue and green 1)
• These are both green (while pointing at the green 1 and 2)
• This one is blue
• This one is yellow
• This one is a five
• This one is a two

You have a limited number of clues you can give, and anyone can replenish that number by using their turn to discard a card they think the table doesn’t need anymore. If you want a perfect score, each clue needs to work a double shift: the cards you don’t mention in the clue you give to me are just as relevant to what I’m about to do as the cards you do. If a card has been in my hand for four turns and nobody has so much as glanced at it, I’ll probably discard it. It doesn’t take long for players to start twisting the cards in their hand in weird ways to try to keep track of what’s what, and that’s where the magic lies.

Secret Codes

After you’ve played (and lost) a few games of Hanabi, you quickly realize that you need to push the boundaries as much as you can on the limited communication rule. Between games, you’ll start shouting things like “if the card is sideways, that OBVIOUSLY means I’m about to discard it. Why didn’t you stop me? I didn’t know it was a five!” 

I’m writing about this because I’m interested in seeing roleplaying games that experiment with this style of missing information. There’s some good juice 🧃 in the way standardized nonverbal communication protocols emerge across subsequent games of Hanabi with the same group, and also in the frustration you might feel by playing with a different group and realizing your card-tilting and clue-giving protocols are incompatible with the way your new teammates operate.

I’m calling these secret codes and am thinking primarily of something like a thieves’ cant. It’s a way to communicate with each other when there are rules in place that say you can’t. The rules to Hanabi as written don’t even reference the possibility of each player creating a concept map by rotating and arranging cards in their hands in specific, agreed-upon ways; it’s just something that develops naturally. It’s clear that this playstyle is expected when you notice that the backs of the cards are asymmetrical and thus can be used by the player holding them to store information. I think keeping this entire layer of gameplay hidden but discoverable is one of the game’s strongest points, but also I wish it was embraced by something more than just the greyscale cardbacks that you stare at the entire game.

Who is Communicating?

The first step I’d take to hack this mechanic into an rpg would be to hash out who is actually communicating in the narrative of the game. How much is in character, and how much sits just outside of the characters’ world? In a traditional roleplaying game, the dice are not part of the story, but they directly influence the way everything unfolds; where will the communication sit in a Hanabi-inspired roleplaying game?

• Player-to-Character: A player gives a clue about the cards from outside the fiction, and thus it represents that character observing their environment or coming up with answers on their own. In this example, the characters don’t know what is on each others’ cards; only the players do. You could argue that Hanabi is player to character communication.
• Character-to-Character: Players exchange clues diegetically as though their characters are the ones giving & receiving the information. This is interesting because it’s immediately asking why players have agency over that which they have no knowledge, and knowledge of that which they have no agency over. 
• Character-to-Player: You give clues as your character, but receive them as a player which means your character doesn’t receive the knowledge. This implies that the players are acting from outside the game world, and the characters are just dealing with changes unfolding around them and trying their best to influence the actions of some unknowable force. 

Three Ideas That Haunt the Walrus

Player-to-Character: How About A Dungeon Crawler?

Player-to-character communication about missing information would be great in a dungeon crawling game. The characters are trying to progress through a dungeon and avoid danger from the usual suspects: traps, monsters, the environment, and time. These are each mapped to the suits in a standard deck of cards, and players each hold a hand of cards backwards-style like in Hanabi.

I’m imagining a sort of 4-way blackjack developing in the middle of the table. Players can play cards blindly from their hand, and it goes into the running blackjack pile for that suit. If you play a card and that pile remains under 21, you make some forward progress: you notice a trap, engage a skeleton in battle, explore the current dungeon room, or keep good track of time. If you hit 21, it’s a huge success: you disarm a trap, defeat a monster, clear a room, or find some supplies to extend how long you can keep exploring. If it’s a bust, it’s calamity: you trigger a trap, get ambushed by undead, get lost in the dungeon’s maze, or run desperately low on torch fuel.

Of course, the key to making this game sing would lie in how the information is distributed. You would need to adjust the Hanabi-style “these are all [rank]” since there are 13 ranks in a standard deck instead of five, so the possibility of repeats in hand to muddy the waters isn’t very likely. I’d start with splitting that into 3 categories, so you can say “these are all [even/odd/face/suit] cards.”

From there, it’s a matter of rolling it all into the gameplay and roleplaying. I’d probably make this a game with a GM, and make it the GM’s job to enforce whatever communication limitations are in place while also interpreting what happens when specific cards are played and how that interacts with the way the dungeon was prepped. That way, when players develop their secret code across game sessions, they’re doing so in response to the way the GM enforces the rules. You could mix in all kinds of interesting stuff here, e.g. the GM having a hand of cards themself and messing with the blackjack piles, the GM being able to impose new communication restrictions as the game goes on, the GM playing their own little game of blackjack like a dealer. The sky’s the limit.

Character-to-Character: Body Swap RPG

Character-to-character presents a fascinating situation. It specifically implies that the communication restrictions are part of the narrative, as is the imbalance between agency and information. The idea that came to my head immediately was an rpg where you’re a group of highly trained people that ended up in each others’ bodies. You might be a head chef slammed into the body of a martial arts master. The body you’re in has all the tools it needs to whoop up on someone, but you have no idea how to use them. Your hand of cards is your body’s skillset and muscle memory, but you can only look at their backs and swing wildly.

I don’t have specific mechanics in mind for how this one would work. The one thing I’d like to see it play with is slowly turning certain cards around  in your hand to represent  your mind making connections with the new body; maybe once you’ve kicked enough in your martial arts body you get all kick cards revealed as soon as you draw them. 

This game could also play around with limiting who can communicate with you about your cards. The martial arts master might be in the body of a bomb defusal expert, but they’re still the only one that can teach you how to use their old skillset. That bomb defusal expert is of course in your original body, so there’s a triangle of one-way communication established between the three characters.

Character-to-Player: Gods and Mortals 

Character-to-player is the hardest to conceptualize. I think the game Durian, designed by Masato Uesugi, would qualify. In it, you play as employees of a juice shop run by an angry gorilla and you have to satisfy customers’ orders even though you can’t see the entire inventory of the shop. Each player has an inventory card that they can’t see, and you take turns drawing customer cards and choosing which half of the card to serve. If you think the players have collectively over-promised fruits to the customers, you can ring the bell to call your manager over, who will give an anger token to the last player who served a customer (or to you if you were wrong; stop wasting time). In this picture, it’s time to ring the bell because you’ve promised a fourth strawberry but only have 3 in stock. Oops!

Since Durian is a competitive game (with a single loser, which is a mechanic that will probably haunt the walrus in the future), there’s not much of a secret code being developed. It’s mostly giggles, oohs, ahhs, and sucking teeth. I say it’s probably the closest example of character-to-player because information is only passed when someone plays a card or rings the bell. If you confidently play another 3 strawberry card and I don’t see many strawberries at the table, I might assume that it is I who is holding the strawberries. Your in-character decision to serve strawberries to a customer has led to conclusions in my mind as a player.

My pitch on a character-to-player rpg would probably have to include a relationship between gods and mortals. The players holding cards would basically act as the unknowable forces of the game world’s gods, and their hands would represent their ability to influence the world. Giving information to the gods would come in the form of prayer, worship, or tribute. “We need a five of spades,” they might cry out, “lest we perish from this earth.” The secret code that slowly develops would be a refinement of the doctrines of the players’ religion as they slowly piece together what types of prayer work and what types lead to some form of destruction.

It stretches what counts as “player” vs “character” to be sure; you could easily hop into the comments to yell at me that gods are technically characters in this world and so it doesn’t count. I invite you to do that, so long as you slam in a better idea for how to do a character-to-player missing information roleplaying game!

That’ll do it!

Thanks for reading the first post from Haunted Walrus. This will likely be the format as I get started; I’ll pick apart a board game mechanic and then pitch some rpg ideas that you could build around it. I fully invite you to steal these ideas for your own games; just let me know where I can pick up the game when it’s published! 

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