Crazy Eights
card game
Crazy Eights is a card game for two to seven players and the best known American member of the Eights Group which also includes Switch, Mau-Mau, Whot!, and Uno.. The object of the game is to be the first player to discard all of their cards.
Originally this was played primarily by children with the left over cards not used in Euchre. Now a standard 52-card deck is used when there are five or fewer players. When there are more than five players, two decks are shuffled together and all 104 cards are used.
Origins
The game first appeared as Eights in the 1930s, and the name Crazy Eights dates to the 1940s, derived from the United States military designation for discharge of mentally unstable soldiers, Section 8. It may have derived from the German game of Mau-Mau.
There are many variations of the basic game, under names including Craits, Last card, and Switch. Bartok, Mao, Taki, and Uno add further elements to the game.
David Parlett describes Crazy Eights as "not so much a game as a basic pattern of play on which a wide variety of changes can be rung," noting that players can easily invent and explore new rules.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2739146. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Crazy Eights” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.