Crazy Eights — free card game against the computer

Seven cards each, one card face up, and the rest as a stock pile. On your turn you play a card that matches the face-up card by suit or by rank. An eight is wild: play one and you name the suit that has to be followed. First player to run out of cards wins the round.

Your score is rounds won in a row, so a single loss ends the run. A round takes a minute or two, the computer never looks at your hand, and a half-finished round is saved if you close the tab. Free, no download, no sign-up.

How to play

• Tap a card in your hand that matches the discard by suit or rank. Cards you cannot legally play are dimmed.
• An 8 can always be played, whatever is showing. After it, pick the suit the other player must follow.
• If nothing is playable, draw. The DRAW button lights up only when you genuinely have no legal card, so you can never stall for a better hand.
• Empty your hand to win the round and add one to your streak.
• If the stock runs out and neither side can move, the lower card total wins — aces count 1, picture cards 10, eights 50.

The eight in your hand is worth more than the eight on the table

Crazy Eights looks like it has almost no decisions in it. It has three, and they all come down to the same question: what are you keeping for later?

The first is the eight itself. An eight is the only card in the deck that is legal at every moment of the game, which makes it a guaranteed escape from being blocked. Playing one early to grab the suit you like is almost always a bad trade: you have spent your one unblockable card to gain a small advantage now, and you will draw four cards later for want of it. Hold at least one until you are actually stuck, or until it wins the round outright.

The second is suit length. The card you should usually play is not the highest or the safest, it is the one from the suit you hold most of, because playing it keeps the discard in a suit you can follow next turn too. Emptying your short suits first sounds tidy and leaves you holding four hearts with a spade on the table.

The third is reading the other player, and it is where this version's opponent does its work. The computer here never looks at your hand. What it does watch is public: how many cards you are holding, and which suits it has seen you actually play. When you are down to one or two cards it will steer the suit away from the ones you have been playing, on the reasonable theory that those are the suits you are long in. That is the same rule the Hearts opponent on this site follows — an opponent that peeks is not harder, it is broken.

The scoring rule for a blocked board is the traditional one and it is worth knowing before you get there: if the stock empties and nobody can move, you count the cards left in your hand. Number cards are worth their face value, picture cards ten, aces one, and eights fifty. That last number is the game telling you plainly what an unplayed eight costs.

More games

More from 🃏 Card & solitaire games:

• Spades — You and North against West and East. Bid your tricks, then take them. Spades are always trump.
• Gin Rummy — Gin Rummy
• Yukon Solitaire — Klondike with no deck to draw from. Any card moves, and its whole pile comes along.
• Cribbage — Throw two to your crib, peg to thirty-one, then count the show. One deal at a time.
• Speed — No turns at all. Both of you play at once, one rank up or down, until someone runs out.

Or browse all games.