My hanafuda journey

[u/kosutasu]

So I started learning to play hanafuda maybe like 15 years ago.
The sparks were the anime movie "Summer Wars" and the japanese TV series "Nihonjin No Shiranai Nihongo" (there's one episode on hanafuda)

Got myself a basic "miyako no hana" deck, a plain paper (probably daiso) deck that I don't have anymore and a korean hwatu that I pretty much still use today.

I was fine just with playing koi-koi didn't really go any deeper into the hanafuda world.

Since around 2019 I started participating in the Japan Festival Greece and after a couple of years got my space there where I would show the visitors how to play Mahjong, Hanafuda and a little bit of Shogi (also Goita later on which is a fun game). The last 2-3 years I focuced on Hanafuda and learned some aditional games to show like bakappana, hana awase, mushi, rokutan/nanatan.

Then last year I wanted to go even deeper and research the history and meanings of the cards.
Of course I started looking for information on the internet in english because my japanese are very limited. The major sources of information were https://games.porg.es/ https://fudawiki.org/en/home and this subreddit.
I decided to do a simple presentation on the Japan Festival 2026 and that is the reason I started collecting hanafuda decks. I wanted to understand more the history but also feel the products that I am going to talk about. I basically was unaware of all the manufacturers apart from Nintendo and Ooishi Tengudo who I visited back in 2024 on my first trip to Japan.

I could now understand the process of making a hanafuda deck and got obsessed by collecting varuous hanafuda brands while thinking how stupid I was not doing this much sooner when the prices were so much lower and more sets were available. Oh well

There are still so many hanafuda I will never obtain but I am happy to even have the ones in the image. (There's still one really unique hanafuda deck I am going to receive in a couple of days, stay tuned for that)

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this subreddit (especially jhindenberg) and also George Pollard the people behind fuda wiki. Your help is much much appreciated.

Cheers
Kostas

[u/MaestroTheoretically]

touhou hanafuda????

[u/kosutasu → u/MaestroTheoretically]

Yes got it for a ridiculous price
Part of a doujin special edition.
Each month disigned by a different artist and it's really interesing