Whenever I play a game with someone new, we quickly realize we have to clarify the rules we’re using beforehand, since so many people have their own varieties. What are some non-standard game rules that you/your family/friends follow?
I’ll start. My family has a rule where we’re not allowed to win on a Wild card. It adds a bit of challenge, and keeps someone from being unbeatable if they play by hoarding wild cards.
I win or you get eaten by kittens
We play speed Uno. If you have the identical card as the card that’s played, you can lay it down if you get it to the pile before the person whose turn it is lays down theirs. Play then continues from you.
I’m glad I saw this post today - I played with kids at lunch and we used your rule. It adds a bit of speed and keeps everyone paying attention.
I had a friend who played this way too and I honestly love it, keeps the game a little more dynamic and fun.
Players must agree beforehand whether you can counter +4s with +2s, and if they’re restricted to the color that the +4 user picked or not.
If you can’t play a card, you buy only one card and if you can’t play it, you skip that turn.
If you have multiple cards of the same number (even if different colors) you can play them all at once (but it must be at once, if you didn’t realize you had a stack of similar cards that’s your loss)
You cannot stack sequential number cards (that means no playing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… at once even if they’re the same colors)
We don’t play these rules every time, but they’re incredibly fun.
On a 0, we all swap hands in the direction of play.
Placing a 7 allows you to swap hands with a person of choice.
+2 cards can be stacked, the first person without a +2 takes all of them
Wait, there are people playing without stacking +2?
I’ve done similar. But we had 6s pass left, 9s pass right (heh heh), 0 I think was your choice and 7 I think was across from you. But I might have swapped those (0s’ and 7s’) effects.
I had never heard of all these custom rules at the time ('06-ish) and got thrown into that plus jumping in with identical cards at the same time.
There might have been one more minor rule at the time, but I can’t remember now.
If you can’t play on your turn, you keep drawing until you can.
If you combine that rule with the ability to endlessly stack Draw 2 or Draw 4 cards, you have what I think may be the most evil version of Uno that can be played. We called it Thermo-Nuclear Uno (i.e. Mutually Assured Destruction) since you knew that dropping a Draw 4 would almost certainly lead to someone being buried in cards and it might even be you. Even if you manage to dodge the stack, payback is coming and you won’t get lucky every time. I can remember games that we would finally just quit after an hour since no one would ever be able lay down their last card. Merging two decks can make this even more brutal and cuts down on interplay shuffles too.
This is how we play… and it has resulted in some VERY long games.
Once we had some friends over and their 8 year old son was playing with us. He almost won a few times, but his dad did everything in his power to keep him from winning. It was close to midnight before that game ended and it was the first time I considered changing the house rules.
Adults cane be weirdly petty about kids winning games.
I barely beat my aunt and grandma at a game of scrabble when I was around 13 by playing the word “ulu,” a type of Alaskan knife. It let me triple word score and clear my rack. I had no idea it was a valid word, but it was and it pushed me to a win.
The whining and complaining about that win nearly ruined the whole night.
Yeah that was our awful step grandfather who would complain when anyone but him won. As a result, we never played games with him so we can celebrate whenever anyone wins. Unfortunately my idiot brother seems to have taken after my idiot step grandfather, so he doesn’t get to play games with us either.
My favorite Scrabble win was using ‘eBay’… before playing that word I looked at the instruction sheet and it specifically said that “words that begin with a capital” are not allowed. There were some sour grapes after that one.
We have a custom Fuck Uno card that is +12.
if you land on free parking you get to keep the discard pile
my house does this with castling. it definitely makes things that much more tense when you omly have one box left on the yahtzee scorecard
Strict rules, buddy. If it’s your turn and you ask if it’s your turn, +2. You go out of turn? +2. Everyone’s looking at you weird? Believe it or not, +2.
Doubles and stacking.
I’m not playing with that “pull until you draw a playable card” rule. It can be a wild card, but as a general rule, nah.
Jump in and stack 2 on 2.
My personal gripe is mostdenysay 4 on 4 can not be stacked but I disagree.
Even the actual UNO video game has 4+4 stacking (with the modifier. But there are modifiers disabled by default that are default-rules in the physical game)Nah if it’s a draw card it can be stacked is how I play it.
Only thing is you can stack a draw 4 on a draw 2 but not the other way around
Everyone is required to wear a red clown nose during the game… and nothing else!
That sounds like a… fun house.
Back with my family growing up, we sometimes played Uno with Cheating.
Basically this meant you were allowed to cheat in any which way (playing on somebody else’s turn, playing mismatching cards, playing several cards at once, drawing too few cards, hiding cards somewhere…). BUT if you were caught before the next player made their move, you had to undo the cheating (e.g. take back the cards), draw an extra card, and you forfeited your turn.
This sometimes led to extreme fun, particularly late at night when everybody was tired and cheating was more likely to go unnoticed.
this could be great if its undo the cheating, draw and extra card, and take a drink!
That sounds awesome. Will try it.
We play +2s, Reverse, and +4 wilds can be stacked. A +4 being played needs a colour declaration, and a +2/reverse of that colour can continue the stack.
Usually this means +4 will kill the pile and the unfortunate sod is picking up 6, or 8, or whatever… But sometimes, they magically have the correct Reverse, or +2 and escape with their life.
An alternative side rule we play is chains. I play a green 3, I can immediately play a green 4, then a red 4… Until I can no longer play matching number, or consecutive colour, or effect card.
Mostly because we used to play a card game we called Blackjack, that is basically Uno, but with chaining. Aces were wild, 2s were pick up 2, 8s were miss a go, Jacks of spades/clubs were pick up 7, Jacks of hearts/diamonds did something else.
I have played Uno once in my life. (I’m not opposed to it. My family just played 500 Rummy when we wanted to play a card game. I never even heard of Uno until the one (edit: or uno) time I played it. My wife recently informed me that this is in some way unusual or, to use her words, “so weird.”)
So I guess my house rules these days (it’s been twenty-some years since that one time) would be “during each turn, desperately search the rulebook to figure out what to do.”
I’ve seen a variant that allows consecutive/same cards to be played in one go, so for example 123456. People ended up finishing their cards in very few turns.
My got take - if you’re not playing with stacking draw cards, you’re playing Uno wrong
