Amê - Hanafuda

The Hanafuda deck consists of forty-eight cards divided into twelve families, representing each month of the year. Within each family, each card can be further classified, according to its value: (i) Kasu, (ii) Tan, (iii) Tane, and (iv) Kô. The cards and their ratings by family and by value are presented in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanafuda.

Kasu are the valueless cards. They usually represent isolated flowers, with less information and colors. Tan cards have a ribbon, and each of them corresponds to ten points. Tane cards are similar to the drawings in Kasu of the same family, but with some additional graphical element (in most cases, they correspond to animals). Each of these cards corresponds to ten points. Finally, Kô are special cards, with the highest value (fifty points each).

During the game, there are four groups of cards: one group for each player, a third group for the table, and the forth group is the stock. Cards in the table are all face-up, while cards in the stock are face-down. Initially the two players and the table randomly receive eight cards each. All the remaining 24 cards are left in the stock. The players perform alternately. In each turn, a player p performs two actions. In the first action p tries to match one of his cards with some card of the same family available on the table. If there is a match, p collects the combined pair. Otherwise, p adds one of his cards to the table. In the second action, p turns up the card on the top of the stock, trying to combine it with any card of the table. If there is a match, p collects the combined pair. Otherwise, p adds it to the table. According to the rules mentioned, during each turn, the player could get from zero to four cards. If there is no card on the table, the only choice for the next player is to add one of his cards to the table.
Some combinations of cards have special values and are called combos . Two of these combos, named Shiko or Nana-tan, are special. Once a special combination is achieved, the game ends immediately. If the game ends by normal condition (i.e., no Shiko or Nana-tan), the winner is the player who accumulates more points.

Although there may exist many different ways of playing Hanafuda, Amê corresponds to the well-known variation that is used by Japanese Immigrants in Brazil. The manual for the game and also additional information may be found at https://sourceforge.net/p/gpca/wiki/Hanafuda/.

Amê differs from other mainstream implementation since it was designed as a learning environment for students to develop their own adversarial search strategy in the context of stochastic card games. For further reading about the subject, please find the paper "Amê: An Environment to Learn and Analyze Adversarial Search Algorithms Using Stochastic Card Games" that can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275272459_Am_An_Environment_to_Learn_and_Analyze_Adversarial_Search_Algorithms_Using_Stochastic_Card_Games