How to play Crazy Eights
The rules of Crazy Eights, and a game played out one move at a time.
The rules are below, and they fit on one screen. If reading rules is not how you learn a game, press play: we deal a short hand on the real table and stop on every move to say what happened, what you could do, and why.
Press play and we deal a short game of Crazy Eights on the real table. It stops on every move and says what just happened and what you could do next.
What you need and how it starts
One standard pack, no jokers, two people. Each of you gets seven cards, dealt one at a time. The next card is turned face up to start the discard pile, and the rest sit face down as the stock.
If the turned card is an eight it goes back under the stock and the next one is turned instead, so nobody starts on a wild card. Then the first player leads off.
A turn
Play one card from your hand onto the pile. It has to match the card on top by suit or by number. A seven on a seven, a heart on a heart. Playing a different suit with the same number is how the suit changes.
Nothing fits? Draw one card from the stock. If that card fits you can play it straight away. If it does not, you pass and the turn moves on. You draw once per turn, never more.
You are allowed to draw even when you hold a card that fits. Sometimes that is the right call, usually when the only card that fits is an eight.
Eights are wild
An eight goes on anything. When you play one you name a suit, and the next card has to be that suit or another eight.
That is the strategy of the whole game. An eight is not really an escape hatch, it is the one moment you choose what the other person has to find. Name a suit you can follow on your next turn. Better still, name one they have just drawn for.
How it ends
The first one to play their last card wins the hand. When the stock runs out, everything under the top card of the pile is shuffled and becomes the new stock.
At the computer table the winner scores the cards left in the other hands, eights for fifty and faces for ten, and the first to a hundred takes the game. Playing a friend is one hand at a time, so deal again as often as you like.