Krazy 8's Rules

Match it, or play an eight and change the world

Krazy 8's is playable, and it's in beta

Krazy 8's is in the lobby now. Start a table, choose how many sit down, and computer players take any seat nobody else does. You'll play to 250 points.

Beta means it's new, not that it's broken. The rules below are the ones the table deals. No person has yet played a whole hand of it by hand, though a test script has played hundreds. You may well be the first to find something.

Objective

Get rid of every card in your hand. The first player out wins the hand, and scores the value of everything still left in everybody else's hands. First to 250 points wins the game, and the host can set that to 50, 100, 250, 500 or 1000.

The Table

The game is for two to seven players. Whoever starts the table picks how many seats it has, and a new table comes up on four. Any seat nobody takes is played by the computer.
The deal is five cards each at three or more players, and seven each heads-up.
The rest of the pack is the stock, face down. One card is turned up beside it to start the pile.
If that turned-up card is an eight it's buried and another is turned. A hand doesn't open with a wild card and nobody's nomination.

Your Turn

Play one card onto the pile. It has to match the top card either by rank or by the suit in force: a seven of hearts goes on any seven, or on any heart.

An eight is wild. You can play an eight on absolutely anything, and when you do, you name the suit the next player has to follow.

                The suit in force is the one that was named, not the one printed on the
                card. Play the eight of hearts and call spades, and it's
                spades, and the hearts on the card is worth
                nothing. The nomination stands until somebody plays a card that isn't an eight.
                It's the classic thing to get wrong at a kitchen table, so the table keeps track
                of it for you and shows you what's in force.
            

If you can't play, you draw: one card at a time from the stock until you get something you can play. A card you draw can be played the same turn. And you can't draw if you're already holding a legal play: the table will refuse and tell you so.

When the Stock Runs Out

The pile gets shuffled back in. Everything under the top card goes back to make a new stock, and the top card stays where it is.
If there's genuinely nothing left (every card in somebody's hand, one card on the pile) then a player who can't go simply passes.
If nobody at all can move, the hand is over. It's scored the same way as any other hand. A blocked hand never sits there forever waiting for somebody to notice.

The Newfoundland Specials

These are the four we grew up adding, and every table deals them. The host can switch any of them off on the table's settings page before the deal; nobody can change them once a hand is under way.

Card	What it does
A two	The next player picks up 2 and loses their turn, and they lay nothing at all. And twos stack. You can lay two, three or 4 twos in one go and the pickup adds up: 1 for 2, 2 for 4, 3 for 6 and 4 for 8. The first two has to be a card you could legally play; the last one you lay is the one on top, so its suit is the suit in force.
A jack	The next player is skipped. Nobody picks anything up.
The queen of spades	The next player picks up 5 and loses their turn. Queens don't stack the way twos do: one at a time. The other three queens are ordinary cards, unless the host switches on Every queen is a pickup five, and then all four of them do it.
A king	Turns the play around. If it was going one way it now goes the other, so whoever laid a card just before you lays again. With only two of you left it simply passes the turn.
An ace	Nothing special. An ace used to be the card that turned the play around; the king does that now.

                You get one last chance: answer it. Hit by a two, you can lay a two of
                your own instead of picking up, and the pickup grows and moves on:
                2, then 4, then 6 and then 8,
                and on, until somebody can't answer and takes the whole lot. You can answer with a
                stack of twos too. A queen answers a queen the same way
                (5, then 10, then 15…),
                but a two never answers a queen and a queen never answers a two.
                


                If you can't answer, or you'd rather not spend the card, you
                pick up the lot and lose your turn. The host can switch answering off
                on the settings page, and then it's pick up and sit out every time.
            

Scoring

When somebody goes out, everyone else counts what's left in their hand and the winner scores the lot:

Card	Points
Each eight	50
Each Queen	40
Each two	30
Each King	20
Each Jack	15
Each Ace	1
Everything else	Its face value, so a seven is 7

A two is worth 30 against you. That's the sting of it: the card that hurts everybody else is the one you least want to be caught holding.

Hands are dealt one after another and the scores carry over. First to 250 wins the game.

There's one more the host can switch on: losers go down as well. Off (which is how a fresh table deals), only the winner's total moves. On, everybody else takes their own cards off their own total at the same time, and a score can go below nought and stay there. Getting caught with a two and a queen is 30 and 40 off you, not just onto somebody else.

A fresh table plays: Playing to 250 · 2s, jacks, queens and kings all in · only the queen of spades picks up · answer a pickup or take it

Two small things that are choices all the same

The card turned up at the deal never does anything special. A jack turned up won't skip the first player, a two turned up won't make anybody pick up, and a king turned up won't turn the play around.
A two answers a two and a queen answers a queen, never one for the other. And an answer doesn't have to match the suit or the rank on the pile: you're answering a pickup, not opening a play. The last card laid still sets the suit.
You can take a pickup even when you could answer it. Sometimes it's worth six cards to keep your two.
Queens don't stack. Twos do, up to 4 at once. One queen per turn.
Going out on any card is allowed, including a two, a queen or an eight, and that last card does nothing special, because the hand is already over.

None of those is written down in any book. They're stated here because "the program happens to do it that way" isn't a decision anybody made.

The other games

Scat (31), 120s (Auction) and Go Fish are all playable too.

To join a game waiting for players, to start your own game, or simply spectate a public game in progress, request an invite.