In 2013, Hanabi won the Spiel des Jahres, an industry award for best board game of the year.

At the end of the game, the values of the highest cards in each suit are summed, resulting in a total score out of a possible 25 points.

[7][8] In 2019, DeepMind proposed Hanabi as an ideal game with which to establish a new benchmark for Artificial intelligence research in cooperative play.

[11] Ad hoc team play is a far greater challenge for AI, because "Hanabi elevates reasoning about the beliefs and intentions of other agents to the foreground".

[8] Playing at human levels with ad hoc teams requires the algorithms to learn and develop communication conventions and strategies over time with other players via a theory of mind.

[11] DeepMind released an open source code framework to facilitate research, called the Hanabi Learning Environment.