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Winning tricks is normally the point of a trick-taking game. In Hiifuu, you need to be a little more restrained. Your aim each round is to win exactly two tricks. One isn’t enough, while a third means you’ve gone too far and won’t score anything that round. The original Japanese title, Hii Fuu!, means “1, 2”, which is pretty much the number you’ll be counting throughout the game.
There is another question mixed into that simple target: when do you want to get your second trick? The scoring tokens become more valuable as players claim them, so waiting can be worthwhile. Of course, waiting also means you might never get there. And once you do have your two tricks, every remaining card becomes something you’d quite like somebody else to win. So while the goal is easy to understand, actually getting through a round with exactly two tricks is another matter.
👥 4-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designer: Yozaemon Matumoto
🎨 Artwork: Doriane Frache
🏢 Publisher: IELLO Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Hiifuu is a trick-taking game for four to six players, played over a maximum of five rounds. The deck contains four colours, with cards numbered from 1 to 18. You won’t use all of them at every player count. With four players you use values 1 to 13, with five players 1 to 15, and with six players the complete deck.
At the start of a round, the cards are shuffled and dealt equally. Everyone then chooses some cards to discard face down. Four-player games have you discard four cards, five-player games three and six-player games two. This leaves everyone with nine cards at four and five players, or ten cards with six. Each round also gets its own set of four scoring tokens, which are placed number side up in ascending order.
The actual trick-taking is straightforward. A random player starts the first round by playing any card. That colour becomes the colour of the trick and everyone else must follow it if they can. If you don’t have a card of that colour, you may play anything. Once everyone has played, the highest-numbered card in the led colour wins. That player collects the trick and leads the next one. In later rounds, whoever won the final trick of the previous round gets to start.
Where Hiifuu differs is in what you’re trying to achieve with those tricks. As soon as you win your second trick, you take the next available scoring token and place it on your trick pile. Because the tokens are normally arranged from lowest to highest, being the first player to reach two tricks gives you the lowest-value token still available. Waiting longer can therefore mean more points.
You can’t simply collect your token and relax, though. If you win a third trick, you place those cards over your scoring token, covering it. That means you won’t score anything from the round. You continue playing normally and can still win more tricks, but those extra wins won’t restore your token. At that point, they can mainly be used to keep tricks away from other players.
Once everyone has played their cards, players with an uncovered scoring token keep it. Covered tokens and any unclaimed tokens from that round are returned to the box. If someone has reached or passed 10 points, the game ends. Otherwise, another round begins until you’ve played a maximum of five. The player with the most points on their collected tokens wins. There’s also a variant where the scoring tokens are placed in random order rather than ascending order.
Artwork & Components
Hiifuu comes in a small box containing 72 cards and 20 scoring tokens. The cards run from 1 to 18 in four colours, while the tokens are split into five differently coloured sets, one for each possible round. Each set contains four numbered tokens. It’s a compact production, without a board or other pieces taking up space on the table.
The cards have a botanical style, with flowers, leaves, seed pods and various other shapes running across them. Some of those objects are easier to identify than others. The four suits use pastel pink, green, blue-purple and orange, and the illustrations change from card to card while keeping the same general style. There are lots of thin curling lines running through the artwork, which gives the cards a slightly decorative, almost Art Nouveau appearance. I particularly like the card backs. They’re dark green with white botanical drawings, which makes quite a contrast with the lighter fronts.
The scoring tokens are much brighter, using lime, yellow, lavender, pink and turquoise for the five rounds. They’re cardboard pieces with large white numbers, so the current rewards are easy to spot when they’re sitting beside the cards. There’s not much else in the box, and there doesn’t really need to be. Most of what you’re looking at during play is a collection of cards, trick piles and those four increasingly tempting scoring tokens.
My main issue with the presentation is the colour coding. Some of the pastel colours can be fairly close, and the extra visual indicators aren’t as prominent as I would have liked. Under good lighting we didn’t have much trouble with them, but colour-blind players may have a harder time separating suits quickly. In a game where you constantly need to see which colour has been led, stronger secondary symbols would have helped.
Our Experience
Our first game was mostly spent worrying about our own cards. We were looking for two tricks, trying to identify which cards could win them, and then hoping everything else would somehow sort itself out afterwards. It didn’t always. Getting to two fairly early initially felt like we’d done the difficult part, until one of us realised there were still several cards left to play and an annoyingly high card sitting in hand. Suddenly the person who had been pleased about winning was trying very hard to lose. That reversal caused a few laughs around the table, particularly when everyone else realised exactly what was happening and became rather less willing to help.
After a few rounds, we weren’t looking only at our own trick piles anymore. One player might still have nothing and be getting increasingly desperate for a win. Someone else might have one trick and be waiting for an opportunity to grab their second. Meanwhile, the person sitting on two wants almost exactly the opposite. We had moments where I wanted another player to beat me, only to spend the next trick trying to stop that same person from winning. Nobody is actually forming teams, but your interests can line up for about thirty seconds before everyone goes back to being inconvenient again.
We also learnt that taking a third trick doesn’t mean you’re finished with the round. In one of our early games, somebody busted and more or less assumed their remaining cards didn’t matter much anymore. A few tricks later it became obvious that they could still cause plenty of trouble. Once your own points are gone, taking another trick from someone who desperately needs it can be surprisingly useful. We initially treated that third trick almost like an early exit from the round, but it isn’t. Your reason for caring about the remaining tricks changes, and that kept everyone involved until the final card.
The discard at the beginning of each round took us a little longer to understand as well. At first, we mostly threw away cards that looked inconvenient. Later we started thinking about what we wanted our hand to look like halfway through the round. Getting rid of enough cards in one colour could give us more freedom later, while keeping a couple of higher cards gave us possible ways to secure our two wins. We also started keeping cards specifically because they looked likely to lose. I can’t say I often look at a mediocre card and think, “Excellent, exactly what I needed”, but here we are.
None of that meant we could completely control a round. Some hands gave us a much clearer route than others, and there were games where hidden discards or an awkward distribution of colours made our original plan fairly useless. We had a few discussions afterwards about whether a bad result was something we could actually have avoided. Sometimes it clearly was. Sometimes the conclusion was basically a shrug. We felt this more with five or six players, where there are also only four scoring tokens to claim. At lower counts, we found it easier to follow individual players and work out what they were trying to do. The larger games were messier and more confrontational, which can be fun, but we personally preferred having a little more control over what was happening.
Our Thoughts
One thing we kept noticing is that there is rarely one outcome to a trick that everybody wants. Whether a particular player winning is good or bad depends on where everyone currently sits in relation to those two tricks. That makes the trick piles around the table almost as important to watch as the cards being played. Someone getting their first trick might not bother you at all, while that same player taking their second a few turns later could be exactly what you were trying to prevent. And if they’re already sitting on two, you might suddenly be very happy to see them win again.
That exact-two target also makes hand strength less straightforward than it first appears. A hand full of high cards may solve the problem of getting your first two tricks, only to leave you wondering how on earth you’re going to stop winning afterwards. Lower cards can become useful simply because you have a better idea of where they’ll end up. The discard gives you some influence over this before the round begins, but not enough to guarantee a particular route. You’re basically preparing a hand for two different jobs: first it needs to win, and then, ideally, it needs to stop winning.
The scoring tokens stop the obvious approach from being to reach two as quickly as possible. Taking an earlier token gives you fewer points and leaves you with more cards still to play, while waiting for a later one increases the reward but also increases the chance that your second trick simply never arrives. And if you’re behind on points, waiting suddenly becomes a lot more tempting. We prefer the standard ascending token order for this reason. The random variant works, but knowing that the values increase gives us a reason to judge how long we’re willing to wait rather than simply reacting to whichever token happens to be next.
Hiifuu doesn’t have lots of different elements to discover. You’re working with numbered cards, four colours and the same target each round. For us, the variety mostly comes from the different hands and what everyone around the table is trying to do. How much you enjoy that will probably depend on your group. The amount of control won’t suit everyone either. Particularly with five or six players, there will be rounds where you can’t look back and point to one obvious mistake that cost you the points. If you like being able to look back after a round and clearly see where you went wrong, that uncertainty may be frustrating. My other criticism remains the card accessibility. I like the pastel artwork, but I wish the suits were easier to tell apart without relying so much on colour, particularly for players with colour-vision deficiencies.
In the end, we came away pretty positive about Hiifuu. We liked that we often cared about who won a trick even when we weren’t going to win it ourselves. Somebody getting their first trick, somebody else reaching two, or the player beside you accidentally taking their third can change what you want to happen next. Not every round gives you the same amount of control, and at higher player counts that can occasionally be frustrating, but for us the uncertainty is usually worth it for the situations it creates around the table. When we’re choosing a compact trick-taker for a group that enjoys watching what everyone else is doing and doesn’t mind making life slightly difficult for each other, I can definitely see Hiifuu coming out again.
📝 We received a copy of Hiifuu from IELLO.
