Crazy Eights Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

Crazy Eights is the ancestor of every commercial shedding game on the shelf. One standard deck, a face-up discard pile, and a simple rule: match the top card by suit or by rank, or play an eight and name whatever suit you like. First player out of cards ends the round and everyone else pays for what they are holding.

Because the scoring is one plain number per player per round with a running total, this is a straight rounds game.

Setup

Use a single 52-card deck for two to five players and two decks for six or seven. Deal five cards each, or seven when only two people are playing. Turn the next card face up to start the discard pile and put the rest face down as the stock. If the turned card is an eight, bury it and turn another.

How to play

On your turn play one card that matches the top of the pile either in suit or in rank. An eight may be played on anything at all, and the player who plays it names the suit that must be followed next. If you cannot play, draw from the stock until something matches, then play it. If the stock runs out and you still cannot go, you pass.

The first player to get rid of every card ends the round immediately. Everyone else is stuck with what is in their hand.

Scoring

Standard penalty scoring, which is what the app defaults to:

• The player who went out scores 0.
• Every other player counts the cards remaining in their hand: each eight is 50, each king, queen or jack is 10, each ten is 10, each ace is 1, and every other card counts its printed number, so a six is 6.
• Those penalties are added to the player's running total.

Nothing is capped and nothing goes negative. A hand of two eights and a king is 110 in one round.

The common alternative flips the direction. Nobody records penalties; instead the winner of the round banks the combined value of every other player's hand, using the same card values, and everybody else scores 0. In that mode the highest total wins rather than the lowest, so the app must flip the win condition when the setting changes.

Worked example with three losing hands of 15, 8 and 32. In penalty mode those three players record 15, 8 and 32 and the winner records 0. In winner-collects mode the winner records 55 and the other three record 0.

Ending the game

Play rounds until someone's total reaches 100. At that point the game stops and the player with the lowest total wins, which is usually not the player who just crossed the line. In winner-collects mode the target works the other way and the first player to reach it wins outright.

Common variations

Two hundred is a common alternative stop score for a longer session. Many groups bolt on action cards: twos make the next player draw two, jacks or queens skip a turn, and aces reverse the direction of play. Once action cards are in, the question of whether draw twos stack is the argument that decides how long a round lasts.