Bicycle Sparrow Hanafuda. United States Playing Card Company, USA. Full hanafuda / regular deck, 56 single-headed cards. Size: 63mm x 88mm.
Deck make-up (from the hanafuda point of view):
12x monthly suits + 1x 13th suit: 4 cards each.
Extras: jokers x2, blank card, double-backed card.
A combined hanafuda-and-regular deck from the huge USPCC under the Bicycle brand. Designed by Juniardi Satyanagara and released in a limited edition of 2000.
This special deck, released in 2022, represents a rare attempt for a Western company to market a Japanese hanafuda deck. At the time of writing, only the French company, Robin Red, and the US company, Junior, are doing similar, with their own decks. The Bicycle deck is widely available, though currently seems mostly marketed to the magic fraternity.
The motif of the deck is sparrows. I'm not quite sure why sparrows have been added, and I would have preferred a plain hanafuda deck myself. Sparrows are more associated with mahjong than hanafuda (the original name of mahjong, máquè, actually means "sparrows" in Chinese) so I wonder if somebody had a Far East brain fart here?
The artwork perhaps also reflects the designer's unfamiliarity with hanafuda in other ways. Hanafuda proper has two types of red ribbons – plain red and red with poetry – most games require players to be able to distinguish the two. Here, they are all plain red. The second obvious issue is that the month of November should feature an animal (tane) card (a swallow) and it doesn't – a plain (aka junk or chaff or kasu) card appears in its place. I can think of no logical reason for this other than it being a big, bad, bald mistake. (If I am missing some obvious explanation for this, please let me know!) I wonder whether these foul ups are the reason the deck is being marketed at magicians (i.e. "Oh hell – you can't play hanafuda games with it, so let's pretend it's a magic deck.")?
More positively, the cards feel lovely in the hands, as you would expect from the Bicycle brand – very slippery! And nicely, each suit's artwork forms a continuous quadtych-style montage when that suit's cards are put side by side.
Please note that the pack does not feature rules for any hanafuda game – you'll need to find those yourself.
Click on any card to explore the design.
(Click here for my primer on hanafuda cards, if you need to know the basics of the structure of this deck.)
(Comments or corrections, please e-mail: Click to see e-mail address.)
Card image size, below:
I'm not sure those trees look too much like the Japanese pine trees they are supposed to be.
Please see the rubric at the top of this page for what appears to be a major goof in this month's pictures (no swallow card).
Since Sparrow Hanafuda is a bi-use hanafuda/regular deck, the kings have to be slotted in, so they are added here without a particular flower of the month. You take these cards out if you are playing a hanafuda game.
The pack comes with two jokers (first two images) and a spare blank card. Additionally, a double-backed card is included (I am told this is a "gaff" card and is for magic tricks). The back/reverse on all cards is shown in the fifth image.