Hanami Review – Aggressive Rice Ball Hoarding Has Never Looked This Pretty

Once again, a publisher has gone deep into the mines Reiner Knizia’s back catalogue in search of gold. This time it’s Keymaster Games taking a fresh crack at Hanami, a reimagining of the 1998 classic Samurai. Only now, the battlefields, soldiers, and Buddha statues have been swapped out for festivals, lanterns, and onigiri.

Talk about tonal whiplash. One game looks like a tense territorial struggle between rival clans, while the other feels like you’re squeezing through packed festival streets trying to score snacks and views worth remembering.

But underneath all of that fresh paint, does Hanami still hold up as a modern release?

How to Play

Hanami has you travelling up and down Japan in the midst of festival season. You’ll be placing tiles around festival locations trying nab the best spots to gain celebration points. Each festival has its own flavour, whether it’s lanterns, rice balls, or cherry blossoms, and your tiles represent travellers chasing the experiences they want to see most.

At the start of each turn, you’ll have a hand of five tiles. Each tile belongs to one of the different festival types and has a strength value attached to it. There are also wild tiles and a handful of special ability tiles, but we’ll get to those in a second.

On your turn, you place a tile onto the map, slowly surrounding festival locations as the board fills up.

Whenever a festival becomes completely surrounded, players total the strength of the matching tiles around it. Whoever has the highest strength claims that festival’s celebration token. If there’s a tie though, the token gets pushed off to the side of the board. And if four tokens end up there, the game immediately comes to an end.

Beyond the standard tiles, there are a few special titles mixed in. Some tiles are marked with a Shinkansen icon, making them “fast” tiles that can be played freely alongside your normal turn. There are also boat tiles that can be placed on water spaces, plus movement tiles that let you reposition tiles you’ve already played.

Keymaster Games has also added a collection of new tiles to further separate Hanami from its 1998 predecessor. These include:

• Draw Tiles, which let you pick up another tile mid-turn.
• Cover Tiles, which can be placed over one of your existing tiles.
• Copy Tiles, which take on the properties of an adjacent tile.

Once you’ve finished placing tiles, you refill your hand and start planning your next move.

Festival season comes to an end once one type of celebration token has been completely claimed from the board. At that point, you award three victory points. One for whoever had the most onigiri celebration tokens, one for whoever had the most sakura tokens, and one for whoever had the most lantern celebration tokens.

If one player manages to claim two victory points, they win immediately. But in the extremely likely event of a tie, the winner is whoever collected the most celebration strength outside of their scoring sets.

At that point, you’ve not only found your winner, but also the person who should probably be in charge of planning the group’s next trip to Japan.

Festival of Tricky Choices

If you’re familiar with enough of Reiner Knizia’s catalogue, then Hanami sits somewhere between Blue Lagoon and Yellow & Yangtze. And like both of those games, it’s incredibly sharp. Hanami makes the absolute most out of a remarkably simple ruleset, with quick turns and decisions designed to keep you on your toes.

Part of that comes from the streamlined rules and the speed they create. Every time you’ve finished one decision, it’s already time to make the next. But mostly it comes down to the game’s high interactivity. Everyone is contributing to the same map, and every tile placed changes the puzzle for everyone else. The move you were lining up a moment ago might suddenly disappear, or a better opportunity might open up somewhere else entirely.

That leaves you constantly plotting your next moves, wondering whether to use the tiles in hand to grab celebration tokens now or place them more carefully and set yourself up for a bigger payoff later. Because the board never sits still and your choices are limited, Hanami becomes a tactical experience that keeps you engaged from start to finish.

Of course, the longer game is really about chasing victory points. With only three available, you usually need to commit to a favourite festival and fight hard to secure it. You also need to be tracking what other players are up to, as they keep their earned tokens hidden. More than once I thought I had a comfortable lead in one festival typpe, only to get distracted and discover I’d miscounted by a token or two, and handed away the game instead.

But it’s this blend of tactical and strategic choices that makes Hanami a winner. It’s approachable enough to jump straight in without worrying about deeper mechanics of it all, while still offering plenty for players who enjoy digging into the puzzle.

And the update that Keymaster Games has delivered here is stellar.

The components are chunky, the victory points somehow even chunkier, and the aesthetic strikes a lovely balance between simple and gorgeous. By the end of the game, when the board is filled with colour, the whole thing becomes genuinely pleasing to look at. For an abstract game, Hanami does a surprisingly good job of bringing out the playful spirit of its theme.

I’m also a big fan of the new tiles Keymaster has introduced. They create opportunities for clever plays and add just enough unpredictability and variety to stop the experience from feeling too samey after a few sessions. My only real complaint is that some of the symbols can be easy to miss if you’re not paying close attention.

So this feels like another successful reimagining of a Knizia classic. It’s been a hit with my family, and one I suspect will be staying on our shelf for quite a while yet.