How to play
Crazy Eights
Also known as Eights, Switch, Mau Mau.
- Players
- 2–7
- Play time
- 10 min
- Difficulty
- Easy
Play in 90s
Deal 5–7 cards each (fewer with more players). Flip top of deck to start discard pile. On your turn, play a card matching the top card’s suit OR rank — or play an 8 (wild) and declare a new suit. Can’t play? Draw until you can. First to empty hand wins.
Crazy Eights is the game everyone half-remembers. It’s the ancestor of UNO, the cousin of Switch, and the easiest pickup game in the deck — five-year-olds and grandparents both grasp it within a hand. It’s the warm-up game, the game you play while waiting for one more person to arrive, the game you teach a kid on a long train ride. It’s also the game most people play wrong, because the proper rules involve more strategy than the family version most of us inherited.
What you need
A standard 52-card deck. Two to seven players. Five players is the sweet spot — fewer and the game ends too fast; more and the wait between turns starts to matter.
Setup
Deal seven cards to each player (five each if there are more than five players). Place the rest of the deck face down in the middle as the draw pile. Flip the top card of the draw pile face up next to it to start the discard pile. If the flipped card is an 8, bury it in the middle of the deck and flip a new one.
How to play
Match suit or rank
On your turn, play one card from your hand onto the discard pile that matches either the suit or the rank of the top discarded card. Play a 7 of hearts on a 2 of hearts (suit match), or a 2 of spades on a 2 of hearts (rank match). Play passes clockwise.
Eights are wild
An 8 can be played at any time, on any card. When you play an 8, you call out a new suit, and the next player has to follow that suit (or play another 8). This is the whole reason the game is called Crazy Eights.
Drawing
If you can’t — or don’t want to — play a card, draw from the draw pile until you can. Some house rules cap the draw at three; others make you draw until you find a playable card. We play uncapped: keep drawing until you can play.
Last card
When you play your second-to-last card, announce it (“one card”). Some groups penalise you a draw or two if you forget. Play your last card and you’re out.
How you win
The first player to play their last card wins the round. In a scoring version, the winner gets points for the cards remaining in the other players’ hands — eights are 50 points, face cards are 10, all other cards are face value. First to 100 wins the game. We usually skip scoring and just play hand by hand.
Common variations
Action cards
Many groups add: 2 = next player draws two, J = skip the next player, Q = reverse direction, A = next player draws one. Closer to UNO. Some tables run all of these; others just the J. Pick what your group likes and stick to it.
Mau Mau
The German cousin. Played exactly the same way except you have to say “Mau” when you have one card left and “Mau Mau” when you play your last card. Forget either and you draw a penalty.
Switch
British variant with more action cards (notably the 2-of-spades pickup-five chain). Aggressive and fast.
Strategy
- Save your 8s for late game. They’re your get-out-of-jail card; spending them early to dump a card is almost always a mistake.
- Pay attention to what suits people are calling. If three players in a row called clubs, your spades and diamonds are dead weight.
- When you play an 8, switch to the suit you have most of, not the suit you have least of. The latter feels clever but ends with you holding the long suit.
- If you’re close to winning, dump high-value cards first (face cards, eights) so you don’t get stuck holding them when someone else goes out.
When to pull it out
Mixed groups, ages five to ninety, anywhere with a deck. The starter game. The bridge-from-Snap game.
Origin
Crazy Eights traces back to Eights, an American game from the 1930s, which itself derives from older Swiss and German Mau Mau-family games. UNO is its commercial descendant — Merle Robbins designed UNO in 1971 specifically as a Crazy Eights variant playable without a standard deck.
Also in the tin