Nintendo Began with a Deck of Seasonal Flower Cards

Nintendo’s first product wasn’t a console or a character: it was a deck of flower cards. In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi began making and selling hanafuda in Kyoto, according to Nintendo’s own company history. The deck’s structure is the clever part. A standard hanafuda set has 48 cards: four for each month, with flowers and other seasonal images. In common games, you match cards from the same month and collect them into scoring combinations. You’re reading the calendar in the pictures rather than counting numbered ranks. Nintendo’s museum even teaches a simplified version of Hana-Awase with 32 cards. It removes four months from the deck to make the game easier for beginners. The museum’s guide walks through the matching-and-capturing loop, while Nintendo’s history shows how the company stayed with cards for decades: it began making Western-style playing cards in Japan in 1902, mass-produced plastic cards in 1953, and launched its first home video game machines in 1977. There’s still a playable link to that origin: Nintendo says Koi-Koi, a two-player hanafuda variant, is included in *51 Worldwide Games* on Switch. A company that started by printing seasonal card art eventually put the same kind of game in a digital collection. Sources: [Nintendo company history](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/en/history/index.html) · [Nintendo Museum: Try Playing Hanafuda](https://museum.nintendo.com/en/guide/hanafuda/index.html) · [Nintendo: Revisit its roots with Hanafuda](https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/News/2021/August/Revisit-Nintendo-s-roots-with-Hanafuda-2019412.html) ~gaming