Hanafuda: The Twelve-Month Flower Cards Nintendo Was Founded to Make

A small, thick card shows a full moon rising over a hill of red pampas grass. Another shows a crane flying across a red sun above a pine. A third shows a deer glancing back at a maple tree. Together, forty-eight cards like these form hanafuda (flower cards), a deck that tells the story of a Japanese year through twelve plants, one for each month. The cards are also the starting point of one of the world's best-known game companies, Nintendo.

This guide explains how the hanafuda deck is organized, what each month's plant and card means, how a company founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make these cards is connected to modern video games, and how to play a simple, friendly game called koi-koi. It also covers how the cards spread to Korea and Hawaii and where to find them today.

The Deck at a Glance

A hanafuda deck has 48 cards divided into twelve suits, and each suit represents a month of the year and is named after a plant. The cards are smaller and thicker than Western playing cards, and the illustrations are painted in a clean, graphic style. Each suit has four cards, and the cards fall into four types by value: hikari (bright cards) worth 20 points, tane (animal or object cards) worth 10 points, tanzaku (paper-strip ribbon cards) worth 5 points, and kasu (chaff or plain cards) worth 1 point.

Because the images follow the seasons, the deck is a small calendar that players can read at a glance. The cards echo the way Japanese poetry, painting, and festivals mark the year, with blossoms in spring, the moon in autumn, and rain in the late season. Players learn to recognize each card by its picture rather than by a number, which gives the game a gentle visual rhythm.

A Year in Twelve Plants

The months run in order. January is pine, with the red-crowned crane and the sun as its bright card. February is plum blossom, with a bush warbler. March is cherry blossom, with a curtain as its bright card, a picture of the blossom-viewing party. April is wisteria, with a lesser cuckoo, and May is iris, with an eight-plank bridge. June is peony, with butterflies, and July is bush clover, with a boar.

August is susuki (pampas grass), with the full moon as its bright card and a flight of geese. September is chrysanthemum, with a sake cup. October is maple, with a sika deer. November is willow, whose bright card shows a figure with an umbrella, identified with the calligrapher Ono no Michikaze, along with a barn swallow and a lightning card. December is paulownia, with the phoenix as its bright card. The five bright cards, the crane, the curtain, the moon, the rain man, and the phoenix, are the most valuable in the deck.

From Portuguese Cards to Japanese Art

Playing cards reached Japan from Portuguese traders in the middle of the 16th century, and Japanese makers soon created their own versions. The Tokugawa shogunate banned foreign cards in 1633 and banned an early Japanese style called Tensho karuta in 1648, as the government and card gamblers kept testing each other. Makers responded by changing the designs, making them more abstract and replacing numbers with pictures, and over time the flower-based deck emerged.

The flower theme proved a good fit for Japanese taste. Because each card was a small painting of a plant and a season, a hanafuda deck could be admired as well as played, and it became a popular household game. The deck is still printed in Japan today, and the old pictures remain largely unchanged.

Nintendo's Roots in Kyoto

On 23 September 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded a company in Kyoto to produce handmade hanafuda cards, originally under the name Nintendo Koppai. The firm grew over the years, adding Western-style playing cards in the early 20th century, and in 1953 it became the first company in Japan to mass-produce plastic playing cards. From the 1970s Nintendo moved into video games, but it still makes cards in Japan.

The meaning of the name Nintendo is often said to be something like leaving luck to heaven, but the company's own history does not clearly confirm this. The former factory in Uji, near Kyoto, where playing cards and hanafuda were once made, became the Nintendo Museum in October 2024. Anyone interested in the connection between the cards and the games can learn about it there. Check the official site for current hours and ticket information.

How to Play Koi-Koi

Koi-koi is the most popular hanafuda game. It is played by two people. The dealer gives eight cards to the opponent, eight to the table face up, and eight to themselves, and the remaining cards form a draw pile. On your turn, you match a card from your hand to a table card of the same month and capture both. If you cannot match, you place a card on the table. You then turn the top card of the pile and capture again if it matches.

Two small rules add spice. If a card matches two cards on the table, you choose which one to take. If three cards of one month are already on the table and you play the fourth, you take all four. These details reward players who remember which cards have already appeared, and they explain why the game feels like a quiet duel of memory and nerve. Before the first round, the players usually agree on how the dealer is chosen, often by drawing a card, with the earlier month winning.

Captured cards build combinations called yaku. Sanko is three bright cards, worth 5 points. Inoshikacho is the boar, deer, and butterfly, worth 5 points. Akatan and Aotan are sets of three red or three blue ribbons, each worth 5 points. When you complete a yaku, you choose between ending the round and scoring, or calling koi-koi, which means come on, and playing on to score more. It is a gamble, because if your opponent completes a yaku first, they score double and you score nothing. A full game normally lasts twelve rounds, one for each month, and a score of 7 or more is doubled.

Hanafuda Beyond Japan

The cards crossed the sea in the late 1890s, when they arrived in Korea and became known as hwatu. Korean decks swap the November and December suits, and the game of go-stop is played with them. In Hawaii, Japanese immigrants brought hanafuda in the early 1900s, and the local game of Sakura became a social pastime there. Other Japanese games include Hachi-Hachi.

Today, hanafuda are enjoyed in casual card games at home, and increasingly as collectibles with modern artwork. Many people are introduced to koi-koi through video games and apps, which makes it easy to learn the rules before holding the real cards.

Plan Your Visit

Hanafuda decks are sold in toy shops, stationery stores, souvenir shops, and online, and a standard deck is light and flat, so it fits easily in a suitcase. Ask whether a set includes a rule sheet, and ask the shop about versions with traditional or modern artwork. The Nintendo Museum in the Kyoto area offers a way to see the history of the company and its connection to cards, and tickets and hours should be checked in advance on the official site. A few simple tips: shuffle gently, since the cards are thick, keep the deck dry, and treat a rare vintage deck as a collectible rather than a game set.