Tuhwa, the “battle of flowers”
Tuhwa is a new version of hwatu, the traditional playing card widely used in Korea. Using Korean traditional coloring technique, it has given a brand new look to the existing hwatu cards, illustrations on which are deemed rather unsophisticated.
Since Korea’s hwatu has a history dating back to the 19th century when it was supposedly brought from Japan and the card game is probably the most popular one in the country, hwatu of various designs is currently on offer. Now on top of that, Utmost has come up with Tuhwa that features traditional Korean painting and will excite art collectors waiting for their own “treasure”.
Like hwatu, Tuhwa consists of 48 cards plus some bonus cards and twelve suits (a suit refers to a set of four cards), each of which corresponding to twelve months of the year, constitute twelve pictures of flowers. While based on the existing symbolic representations found in hwatu cards, Tuhwa’s illustration of plants and animals appearing in the cards has specifically emulated Korean folk paintings. Accordingly, its overall image is very natural and harmonious, particularly catering to Koreans, and will also appeal to foreigners who are interested in things Korean.
It takes a suit to get the whole image including the picture of a designated flower for each month. While retaining the image of scenery in the background observed in usual hwatu so as not to bewilder the card game players, Tuhwa revamped it to better suit the taste of modern customers.
*Hwatu games are usually played with three players, with two-person or four-person variants. The most popular game with hwatu cards is ‘Go-Stop’. The objective of the game is to create scoring combinations of taken cards towards a minimum predetermined number of points – usually three (for three players) or seven (for two players) – and then call a ‘Go’ or a ‘Stop’, from which the name of the game derives.
*Hwatu cards generally fall into four types: gwang, meaning “bright”; keut, mostly featuring animals and particularly including godori (featuring birds); ti, meaning “ribbon” and including cheongdan (blue ribbon cards), hongdan (red ribbon cards with letters) and chodan (red ribbon cards without letters); and pi, junk cards. Typically, each suit of cards representing months has two pis and two special cards such as gwang or ti.
Symbolic representations for the month
January: The sun, a crane and pine trees (one gwang, one hongdan and two pis)
February: Apricot flowers and a bush warbler (one keut, one hongdan and two pis)
March: Cherry blossoms and a tiled wall (one gwang, one hongdan and two pis)
April: Wisteria and a cuckoo (one keut, one chodan and two pis)
May: Iris and a wooden bridge (one keut, one chodan and two pis)
June: Peony and butterflies (one keut, one cheongdan and two pis)
July: Bush clover and a wild boar (one keut, one chodan and two pis)
August: The moon and silver grass (one gwang, one keut and two pis)
September: Chrysanthemum and a cup (one keut or sangpi, one cheongdan and two pis)
October: Autumn leaves and a deer (one keut, one cheongdan and two pis)
November: Paulownia leaves and an oriental phoenix (one gwang, one sangpi and two pis)
December: A calligrapher with an umbrella up, a frog and a swallow (one gwang, one keut, one dan and one sangpi)
MORE GAME RULES HERE
