Min-Ha-T o

The Japanese cards known as "Hana-Fuda" are also popular in Korea. Here, the cards are known as ha-to, and one of the games played with them is "Min-Ha-to". The style of the cards is slightly different from the Japanese ones: the cards are larger and thinner and the twenty-point cards are marked with a small Chinese symbol. I don't have a complete set of the Korean cards, so the standard Japanese deck is explained here. I couldn't find any explanations of the Korean games either, unsurprising since the only reference books I could find in the UK or Japan were of Japanese origin.

Eventually, I learned the rules for this game from a shareware program by Randy L. Pearson, which someone mailed me in 1996. I tried to register it but my cheque was returned. I lost track of it for a while and when I found a reference to it again the site kept moving around: when I last checked (May 2000), a Java version was available here.

Card Points Values

All other illustration cards count ten points, and the tanzaku (hanging scrolls) count five points each. The remainder score zero.

Players

The game as played in Randy's programs is for two players, and a very good two player game it is. I suspect that you could play it for more players by adjusting the deal in the same way as the similar Hawaiian fishing games, but I haven't actually tried this. If you have, then let me know how well it works.

Deal

Select the first "Oya" (Dealer) by cutting the deck: the player who cuts the higher or highest point-card becomes the dealer. After this the Oya alternates (or rotates) except that in the case of a tied game, no points are scored and the same player is Oya again.

For Westerners, shuffling the Japanese cards is a learned skill: the traditional mechanism is to split the deck into three roughly equal piles, split the middle pile and stack half on each of the end piles, then stack the end piles in reverse order. Repeat until you feel they're thoroughly mixed. I gather that if you are fortunate enough to own a Korean set, shuffling and dealing is much more like using western cards.

After a shuffle and cut, the dealer distributes the cards, face down any number of cards at a time to each player in turn. For two players deal ten cards into each hand and place eight face up in the centre. I shall refer to the face-up cards as "table cards". If the dealer accidentally turns over cards whilst dealing, these are used as table cards. Place the remaining cards face down in a pile - these form the "stock".

Play

Starting with the dealer, alternate players take one card from their hand and attempt to match it with any card of the same suit on the table. If there is a match, the cards are placed face up and separate from the rest of the table cards, but not yet in front of the player. If there is no matching card, the card from the hand is added to the table cards. It is not compulsory to play a match if you have one - you may instead discard

Then, regardless of whether the hand card matched, the same player turns up the top card from the stock. If a match was made with the card from the hand and the stock card is of the same suit then, so sorry, this is "Sul-Sa" and all three are returned to the table. Otherwise, the match from the hand is placed face up in front of the player and, if the stock card also matches a card from the table, the player also takes that pair.

If three cards of the same suit are on the table, playing the fourth card wins all the cards.

If four matching cards are dealt to the playing area, the dealer takes all four cards before the first play is made.

If either player is dealt four matching cards, all four are placed face up in front of the player, who also receives a 100 point bonus to make up for the reduced play options.

Play finishes when the hands and stock are exhausted. If a hand is exhausted before the stock, as it will be if four cards of the same suit were dealt, the player simply attempts to match a stock card each turn.

Scoring

Play to an agreed running total: one thousand points gives a game which will probably last five or six hands.

Score all captured cards according to the points system given above, and then account for the special hands. These count both for the player who made the hand and against the other player: playing for these hands is the most important element in the game.

Special Hands

The three sets of tanzaku score a thirty point bonus for each set. Note that the tanzaku shown here as red, from the Japanese set, have white letters on them on a Korean set. The rain tanzaku is red in both cases and does not form part of this special hand.

Hung Don

Chung Don

Cho Don

Three complete-suit sets also make special hands, which score twenty points each. Cho-Si-Ma is the hand of the suit called "Nan-Cho" in Korean, or Ayame in Japanese.

Cho-Si-Ma (20)

Pung-Si-Ma is the "Pung" suit, which is Momiji in Japanese.

Pung-Si-ma (20)

Be-Si-ma (20)

Knowing no Korean, we play using Paulowia as Be-Si-Ma, although I'm sure the program was right (Randy, if you send me an address, I'll willingly register the thing, albeit four years late and despite having long ago lost it.)

Additional Special Hands

Go-To-Ri, all three ten-point birds, scoring fifty:

Shik-Ka (boar-deer-butterfly for Hana-Fuda players), scoring fifty:

Day-Po (viewing the moon and the curtain, for Hana-Fuda players) is worth 100:

In-Ho-Shik-Ka adds the crane, for 150 points (note that these are not three bright and four bright):

Il-E-Sam is the point card from each of the first three months, again for 150:

and lastly O-Gong (which is five bright), scores 200.

We haven't tried these hands in this game, but all except for Il-E-Sam are similar to Japanese Hana-Fuda hands. However, with O-Gong representing a 400-point differential, it would seem to make sense to play to a higher total than 1000, because a single O-Gong occurring almost by accident would significantly unbalance a thousand point game.