Crazy Eights
Also known as Eights, Crazy 8s, Swedish Rummy, Rockaway, Last One, Craits
- Players
- 2-7 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards) for two to five players; 2 decks shuffled together (104 cards) for six or seven
- Time
- 15-30 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Shedding
Setup
Take the jokers out. One 52-card pack handles up to five players; with six or seven, shuffle two packs together and treat them as a single deck of 104. Duplicate cards cause no trouble, since suits and ranks only ever have to be matched, never compared.
Rank order is irrelevant while you are playing. Nothing beats anything else, and an ace is neither high nor low. Rank matters only at the end of the hand, when you count up what is left in the losers' hands.
Pick a first dealer any way you like; cutting for the high card is the usual method. The deal then moves one seat to the left after each hand. The dealer shuffles and deals one card at a time, clockwise, starting with the player on their left. In a two-player game each side gets seven cards. With three or more, everyone gets five.
Put the undealt cards face down in the middle as the stock, then turn the top one face up next to it. That card is the starter and it forms the beginning of the discard pile. If it happens to be an eight, count it as the dealer's own play: the dealer names a suit and the first player follows that. Groups who dislike opening on a wild card instead bury it and turn another, which works as well so long as everyone knows which you are doing.
The player to the dealer's left goes first, and play runs clockwise.
| Players | Each player gets | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 7 cards | One 52-card pack. |
| 3 | 5 cards | — |
| 4 | 5 cards | — |
| 5 | 5 cards | — |
| 6 | 5 cards | Two packs shuffled together, 104 cards. |
| 7 | 5 cards | — |
Play
On your turn you add exactly one card to the top of the discard pile. The card you play must agree with the card currently showing in either its suit or its rank. A ten of hearts, for example, can be covered by any other heart or by any other ten. That is the whole of the matching rule.
Eights are the exception, and they are wild. You may play an eight on top of anything at all, whatever the suit or rank showing, and you may do it on any turn. When you put an eight down you immediately name a suit out loud. The next player has to follow that named suit as though the eight were a card of it, and the named suit stays in force until somebody legally changes it. You are free to name the suit the eight itself belongs to, and you are free to name a suit you hold nothing in. You cannot name "eights" or a rank; only a suit. The only card that can be laid on an eight without regard to the suit called is another eight, which resets the naming.
If you have no legal play, you draw, and how far you draw is the one thing published accounts genuinely split on. One has you take a single card and end your turn whether or not it helped; the other has you keep drawing until something playable turns up. Some tables cap it at three as a compromise. Agree before the first deal, because it changes the game noticeably. What both accounts do agree on is that drawing is always available to you: you may draw on your turn even holding a card you could legally have played, which is how you hang on to an eight for a better moment.
When the stock runs out, take the discard pile, leave its top card in place, shuffle the rest and set them down as a new stock. Several widely printed rule sets skip this refill entirely and treat an empty stock as permanent, so decide which you are using before you start. If you do refill and the discard pile has nothing to spare, or if you are playing without refills, then the stock is simply gone. From that point a player with no legal play passes their turn instead of drawing. If the turn goes all the way around with every player passing, the hand is blocked and ends immediately with nobody going out.
Otherwise the hand ends the moment a player lays down their last card. The standard rule lets you go out on an eight, naming a suit that nobody will ever have to follow; plenty of groups ban this, so settle it in advance. A player down to one card must say "last card", and must say it before the next turn begins; forgetting costs two cards off the stock — the rule the commercial versions of the game made famous, and a standard one here rather than an embellishment.
Goal & scoring
Your aim in each hand is to be the first to run out of cards. Over a session, the aim is to be first to an agreed point target.
When someone goes out, every other player counts the value of what is still in their hand. Eights are punished hardest, which is the price of holding the game's most useful card too long. The player who went out scores the combined total of all the opposing hands. The usual target is fifty points per player at the table, so two play to 100, four to 200 and seven to 350, which keeps a session roughly the same length whatever the numbers. Some groups instead agree on a fixed count of deals and add up as they go.
If the hand blocks because the stock is exhausted and nobody can play, the player with the smallest hand total is credited with the difference between their own total and each opponent's, which is usually a much thinner score than going out cleanly.
A popular alternative flips the bookkeeping. Instead of the winner banking the opponents' cards, each player records the value of the cards left in their own hand as penalty points. Play stops as soon as anyone hits the agreed figure, and the lowest score at that moment wins. The card values are identical either way; only who receives the points changes.
Finish the deal you are in rather than stopping the instant somebody crosses the line. If two players end that deal past the target, the higher total takes it when the winner is collecting points and the lower total takes it when players are recording penalties. If they are exactly level, deal once more and let that hand decide.
| Scores | Value |
|---|---|
| Each eight | 50 |
| Each king, queen, jack or ten | 10 |
| Each ace | 1 |
| Each 2 through 9 | face value |
Variants
Special-card eights — The house-rule package that most tables end up adopting, and the one that commercial versions were built from. A two costs whoever follows their turn and two cards off the stock, unless they hold a two to lay on top of it, in which case the penalty stacks and passes along. A queen skips the next player. An ace turns the direction of play around, which in a two-handed game amounts to a skip. A jack is sometimes used as a second skip. The eight stays wild through all of this. Once you have these on the table you are effectively playing Uno with a standard pack, which is roughly how Uno came about: it was designed in 1971 by an Ohio barber named Merle Robbins after arguments about exactly these kinds of Crazy Eights house rules.
Mau-Mau — The German game that Crazy Eights descends from, still played across central Europe and sold under other names in Switzerland and the Netherlands. It is usually played with a 32-card pack. The jack, not the eight, is the wild card that lets you name a suit. A seven makes the next player draw two, and those penalties stack if they hold a seven of their own. An eight skips a turn. You must call out "Mau" as you play your second-to-last card and "Mau-Mau" as you play the last, and forgetting costs you a penalty draw.
Switch — The British form, and the one most often meant when someone talks about playing Switch or Black Jack. The suit-changing wild card is the ace rather than the eight. Twos make the next player pick up two, and stack if that player also holds a two. Eights or jacks skip a turn depending on the group, and the black jacks are often a heavy pick-up penalty that only a red jack can cancel. A player down to their last card must announce it before their turn ends.
Crazy Eights Countdown — Each player carries a personal countdown number and everybody starts on eight. The rank matching your current number is your own private wild card, so at the start the eight is wild for all. What moves you down the countdown is winning a hand, not playing the wild card: shed your last card and your number drops by one, so the seven becomes your wild card for the next deal, then the six, and so on. The first player to get their number below one wins the session outright and no points need to be counted. Extra powers are usually layered on top: a jack skips the next player, a two forces a draw of two, and the queen of spades forces a draw of five.
Draw-one Eights — The most common single point of disagreement about this game, played as a deliberate rule rather than a mistake. A player who cannot follow suit or rank draws exactly one card from the stock. If it plays, they may play it; if it does not, their turn is over and the next player goes. Hands stay much smaller than in the draw-until-you-can version, deals run quicker, and blocked hands become far more frequent, so the tie-break scoring for a blocked hand actually gets used.
Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, Dice Game Depot, Official Game Rules, Game Rules, Ducksters, PlayingCardDecks.