Skip-Bo Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

Skip-Bo is a commercial sequencing game published by Mattel. The deck holds 162 cards: twelve copies each of the numbers one through twelve, plus eighteen Skip-Bo wild cards. Every player gets a personal stock pile face down with the top card turned up, and the entire game is a race to empty that pile by feeding cards onto shared build piles that always run one, two, three and so on up to twelve.

Scoring is optional at the table but the app needs it, and the shape is a running total per player across rounds, so the rounds template fits. The twist is that only one player scores each round; the rest enter zero.

Setup

Deal each player a stock pile face down: thirty cards with two to four players, twenty with five or six. Turn the top card of each stock pile face up. Put the rest of the deck face down in the middle as the draw pile. Leave room for four build piles in the centre and four discard piles in front of each player.

How to play

Draw up to five cards at the start of your turn. You may then play cards to the centre build piles from three places: your hand, the top of your stock pile, or the top of any of your four discard piles. A build pile always starts with a one and climbs to twelve, then it is cleared away and the space reopens. Skip-Bo cards are wild and can be played as whatever number is needed next.

If you empty your hand of all five cards you immediately draw five more and continue. Your turn only ends when you discard one card onto any of your four discard piles, and there is no discard when you win. The stock pile is the priority: its face-up card is always available, and whenever you play it the next card turns up. The first player to play the last card of their stock pile wins the round on the spot.

Scoring

Only the winner of a round records anything. That player scores:

25 for winning the round, plus 5 for every card still face down or face up in each opponent's stock pile.

Cards in opponents' hands and discard piles are irrelevant. Cards on the centre build piles are irrelevant.

Worked example with four players. The winner ends the round while the others hold 11, 4 and 20 cards in their stock piles. That is 35 cards altogether, so 35 × 5 = 175, plus the 25 win bonus, giving 200. The other three players enter 0.

Every player's total is the sum of their rounds and the first past 500 wins. Because the loser's score never moves, the app should show a running total and let the round entry default to 0 for everyone but the winner.

Ending the game

The game ends the moment a player's total reaches 500, checked at the end of a round. Groups that prefer a fixed length agree a number of deals instead, and the highest total wins.

Common variations

Team play pairs partners around the table sharing one stock pile, which roughly halves the length of a game. Some households skip scoring entirely and treat one emptied stock pile as the whole game. Twenty-card stock piles are the usual choice for a game with children.