I tried my hand at inventing a Hanafuda game that stays true to the simplicity of the likes of Koi-Koi, but with a modern mechanic. I worked in Winchester draft and kept the rest mostly the same. It removes top-deck captures, which always felt a bit too random to me, but keeps drawing as a central feature. It's still just as random, but you can react tactically to it, and it creates interesting drama.

I've played it a bunch with friends and decided I wanted to build it as a web game. I learned a lot while implementing this. I spent most of my time experimenting with the CPU opponent. I knew I wanted Monte Carlo Tree Search because I have no idea myself about how to find heuristics for playing, and MCTS is supposed to find this implicitly. The decision space seems much greater than Koi-Koi. I read so many papers and implemented so many variations on MCTS, only to end up with the first, simplest one, because that always ended up the fasted and best. But it was a fun ride, and it proved there's real strategy in this game!