This is the Strategy Repository for the iBwave Hanabi Players.
It contain all the strategies, principles, techniques and conventions that the group is using and learning in order to become better at the game.
The individual strategy pages will contain the name of the strategy, the explanation of why it works and why it is good, examples of usages, exceptions, and any other relevant information.
If you don't feel like reading all this, the group pages listing the techniques will include a TL;DR of each technique right below the link, allowing to quickly start using it without reading paragraphs.
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Strategy: Any idea used to increase the average score or decrease the defeat ratio while playing Hanabi.
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Principle: An axiom that everything else derives from. It can include terminology (which can be arbitrary), but also core ideas like "We try to not lose all three lives". If there is any disagreement or misunderstanding of core principles, things can go downhill incredibly fast.
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Technique: A Strategy that is currently believed to be objectively optimal (until proven otherwise). Any group playing independently should eventually come up with the same techniques, since they are better than all alternatives. Most of them only work if the entire team is aware of them, but some can still have value regardless.
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Convention: A Strategy that is not believed to be objectively better than alternatives, but in a situation where no option is known to be better, the team wants to agree on a strategy among each other, because there is value in agreeing. Independant groups can come up with wildly different conventions and have very similar efficiencies. It is believed that for most conventions, there IS an objectively best choice, but we don't know which one it is at the moment. With sufficient analysis and calculations, some conventions can become techniques.
- Those are the first principles created from the rules of the game, which serve as axioms for the rest of the strategies.
- Those are the first techniques that a new player will be introduced to. Mastery of those strategies will usually make the difference between victory and defeat on the base game
- Those are intermediate strategies that an experienced player will be introduced to after a reasonable number of games. Mastery of those strategies will allow you to win the harder shuffles of the base game, and will make the difference between victory and defeat for the easier variants
- Those are advanced strategies that a strong player will be introduced to after a large number of games. Mastery of those strategies will allow you to win even the worst shuffles of the base game, and hard shuffles for easy variants. It will also allow a group to have a chance playing some of the harder suit variants, or even attempt winning variant combinations.
- Big list of every single Strategy in this repository, in order
- All the Techniques that we are aware of
- All the Conventions that we have agreed on
- Different flowcharts to use as reminders of what information to consider in different situations
- Different types of Chop Moves and how to perform them
- Common situations where you should take Elimination Notes, and how to use them efficiently
- Moves that sacrifice a life for the sake of efficiency, tempo, or getting out of a sticky situation
- Common mistakes that can easily be identified on the fly and recovered from as well as possible
- All academic papers that have been written about Hanabi that I am aware of
- The group that came up with most of the stuff in this repository. They don't always use the same terminology for similar ideas, but they are the source of almost all of them.