Basics - level 2

#8 Don't be afraid to discard – trust

Trusting your teammates is key in Hanabi. If your teammates have not clued your chop card for some time, you can discard it safely. If you discard an important card, it is their fault. A common mistake from beginners is to think they can't discard because they know nothing about their hand. Therefore, they give (waste) clues, hoping they will receive information. Most of the time, you were told nothing on purpose.

#9 Don't discard too early

Discarding on turn 1 is often dangerous. Unless your team knows the game very well and you have very good reasons for doing it on turn 1, wait a little bit before your first discard.

#10 No duplicates (part 2)

With more than 2 players, if you have some cards clued as X, do not give a X clue to another player. If needed, a third player will be able to give this clue, because he knows which Xs you have been clued about.

Exception: 
- if you are sure the Xs you clue him about are not the same as the Xs you have been clued about, for example they are obviously the last copy of their kind each. Therefore, the fact that you give the clue is more meaningful to the receiver.

#11 Clue timing

There are two main categories of clues: play clues and save clues.

A play clue should be given as soon as possible, i.e. as long as the clue is pure and unambiguous and before the target player takes another turn. Why? If you don't, the player who has the playable card might draw another card that will spoil the clue and it will result in wasting one or more clues to disambiguate the first one.

A save clue is usually best given as late as possible. If you give a save clue too early, you might be wasting a clue.

Two examples showing why:

- if you clue a 5 too early and the player draws another 5 before the first one has reached chop, you will need another clue to save it;

- by the time the card you want to save has reached chop and is in danger of being discarded, it may have become playable and a single clue could be enough to get it played straight away.

This is one of the easiest, yet one of the most important basics to learn, especially “give play clues ASAP”. It lays the foundations of quite a big part of the whole strategy as it leads to other clever tricks we will cover later.

#12 Indirect clue

If you know two of your cards share a feature (say 'yellow') and someone gives you a useless clue about one of them that is not playable, you should give it a thought and work out that the other one is playable.

#13 Count cards

In each colour, there are: 1 1 1 / 2 2 / 3 3 / 4 4 / 5. Knowing this, you may figure out the exact nature of a card you only have partial information on, by looking at other players' hands and at the discard.

Next: level 3.