Five Crowns Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

Five Crowns uses its own deck: two identical 58-card packs shuffled together, giving 116 cards. Each pack has five suits — stars, hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds — running from three up to king, plus three jokers. There are no aces and no twos.

The whole game is eleven rounds long and the hook is that the wild rank moves. In round one you get three cards and every three is wild. In round two you get four cards and fours are wild. By round eleven you are holding thirteen cards and kings are wild. Jokers are wild the whole way through.

Scores go one number per player per round with a running total, and the lowest total after eleven rounds wins, so the rounds template fits directly.

Setup

Shuffle both packs together. Deal the round's number of cards to each player, starting with three. Turn one card face up as the discard pile and put the rest face down as the stock. The deal passes one seat to the left each round.

How to play

On your turn take the top of the discard pile or the top of the stock, then discard one card. You are trying to arrange your entire hand into books and runs. A book is three or more cards of the same rank in different suits. A run is three or more consecutive cards in the same suit. Wild cards — jokers and any card of the current round's rank — can stand in for anything.

When your whole hand fits into valid books and runs, you lay it down and discard your last card. That ends the round for you. Everyone else gets one final turn to lay down as much as they can, and then whatever remains in their hands is counted.

Scoring

The player who went out scores 0 for the round.

Every other player adds up the cards still in their hand that are not part of a valid book or run:

• Number cards three through ten count face value, so a seven is 7.
• Jack 11, queen 12, king 13.
• Any card of the round's wild rank counts 20, regardless of its printed number. In round one a three is 20, not 3.
• Joker 50.

There is no cap and no negative score. A player who lays down nothing in round eleven can easily score over 100.

Note the collision in round eleven: kings are wild that round, so a king counts 20 rather than 13.

Ending the game

After round eleven, when thirteen cards were dealt, totals are compared and the lowest wins. Ties are usually broken by playing one extra thirteen-card round between the players who are level. The app records the tie as a shared win, so raise the number of rounds in match settings to open that decider.

Common variations

Short games of five or seven rounds are common with children. Some groups allow laying off on other players' melds during the final turn, which changes the endgame considerably. Others let the player who goes out subtract ten as a bonus, and a few play that you may go out on your last card without a final discard.