Crazy Eights

Crazy Eights is a shedding game for two to four players. On your turn you play one card onto the discard pile that matches the top card by suit or by rank. The first player to get rid of every card in hand wins the round.

Eights are wild: play one on any card, then nominate the suit the next player must follow. If you can't (or won't) play, draw a card from the stock; if it still won't go, your turn passes.

• When you empty your hand you win the round and score your opponents' leftover cards.
• Eights are worth 50 penalty points each, face cards 10, aces 1, so don't get caught holding them.
• Points accumulate across rounds; the first player to reach 100 loses... so the lowest score wins the match.

• Desktop: click a highlighted card to play it; click the stock pile to draw. Playing an eight opens a suit picker.
• Phone & tablet: tap a playable card or the stock, playable cards are highlighted, no keyboard needed.
• If a draw still leaves you stuck, your turn passes automatically.

• Daily, the same deal for everyone each day.
• New Practice, a fresh random game; choose 2, 3, or 4 players.
• Online, a live one-on-one match against a real person.

• Hold an eight in reserve to escape when you have nothing else to play, not just to dump it.
• Track which suit each opponent keeps switching away from, they're probably short in it.
• Late in a round, ditch your high-value cards first so a sudden loss costs you fewer points.

The game arrived as plain Eights in the 1930s. The name it carries now came in the 1940s, and it is bleaker than the game deserves: Crazy Eights borrows from Section 8, the United States military's discharge designation for soldiers judged mentally unfit to serve.

Its own ancestry probably runs back to the German game Mau-Mau, and its descendants are everywhere — Switch, Last Card, Craits, and the commercial games that added layers to the same skeleton, Uno among them.

The card historian David Parlett puts it best: this is "not so much a game as a basic pattern of play on which a wide variety of changes can be rung." That is why almost every household that plays it plays it slightly wrong, and why nobody is actually wrong.

Crazy Eights is a traditional shedding card game and a classic family favourite. This is an original, free browser version with computer opponents, daily deals, variable player counts, and live online play, no download or sign-up.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.