Crazy Eights

Everyone is dealt five cards. The rest of the deck becomes the stock, and its top card is turned face up to start the discard pile. On your turn you put one card on that pile: it has to match the suit in play, or match the rank of the card on top, or be an eight. Three hands leaves 36 cards in the stock; four hands leaves 31.

An eight is wild. Play one on anything, then name the suit that everyone must follow next — including the eight's own suit, if that is what you want. If you have nothing legal you go to the stock instead, and the first player to get rid of every card wins the round and scores what everybody else is still holding.

One rule catches people out and it is enforced here: you may not draw while you hold something playable. The stock is not a hand-improver. If a card in your hand fits, that card gets played.

The trap is what happens after an eight. The card on top is then an eight, but the suit in play is whatever was called, not the eight's own suit. Put the Eight of Hearts down and call spades and the next player must follow spades — a heart is dead, even though a heart is looking straight up at them. The board shows the suit in play as a separate badge beside the pile for exactly this reason.

The winner takes the value of every card still in the other players' hands. Nothing is subtracted from the winner and nothing is scored by anyone else.

That puts 200 points in the four eights alone and 508 in the whole deck. It is the reason the wild card is not free: an eight you never spent costs you 50 — as much as five court cards together. When a round is blocked rather than won, the lowest hand value takes it and scores the difference against each of the others — and if two hands tie on the lowest value, nobody wins and nobody scores.

Hold it, almost always. About one opening hand in three — 34.1% of five-card hands from a 52-card deck — already contains an eight, so the card is common enough that spending it to save a single draw is a bad trade. Its value is that it is the one card that is legal on every position: it is your guaranteed escape from a suit you cannot follow, and it is 50 points against you if the round ends before you use it.

The computer opponents follow that rule absolutely: they never put an eight down while any ordinary card in their hand is legal. Across every rule setting in the test suite, thousands of eights played, not one went down with a plain card available — the hold penalty in their evaluation outweighs every positive term put together, so an eight is spent only when every legal card left is an eight, which includes going out on one. Everything else they do — which suit to leave in play, whose turn to hand it to — is scored underneath that one hard constraint.

The stock is not reshuffled here. Play simply carries on, and anyone who cannot follow says so and passes. If every player passes in turn without a single card being played, the round is blocked — nobody went out, and the smallest hand takes it on points.

It happens often enough to plan for. Measured over 600 seeded three-handed rounds, with the seats filled both by the shipped opponents and by bots playing a random legal card, between 7% and 11% of classic draw-until rounds end blocked — about one in ten. Turning the twos and queens on pushes that to roughly one round in seven or eight, because a penalty empties the stock in jumps of two, four or six rather than a card at a time. The draw-one rule takes it under one in fifty in every setting, since taking a single card and moving on burns the stock far more slowly than drawing until something fits. If you dislike blocked rounds, that toggle is the fix.

• Draw until you can play — the classic rule, and the default. You keep drawing until something fits or the stock is empty.
• Draw one card — you take a single card. Play it if it fits; if it does not, your turn ends there.
• Twos draw two, and they stack — a two makes the next player take two, unless they answer with a two of their own, which adds two more and passes the whole debt along. An eight does not dodge it; only a two answers a two.
• Queens reverse — a queen turns the order of play around, which is why it matters whether there are three players at the table or four.

Everything above is off by default except the draw-until rule, because the base game has no special cards at all — the eight is the only wild card in Crazy Eights as it is normally published. The optional cards are here because they are what half the people looking for these rules grew up playing.