"Crazy Aces": My Spin on a Classic Card Game

I was first introduced to "Crazy Eights" when I was a young kid (around six or seven years old, to my recollection) by one of my mom's closest friends as a game to play with her two girls and my brother. I've enjoyed playing it ever since.

In fact, in my mid-twenties, I got into a streak of playing Crazy Eights quite a bit with a friend, and we managed to basically break the game through intentionally over-drawing cards and hoarding Eights, leading me to add several rules to try to make the game better and prevent players from breaking it. That was the inspiration that led to Crazy Aces.

While the changes I had made before were a good start, they still needed some adjustments to improve the final product, so this seemed like the perfect first game for my 2025 Card Game Design Challenge.

If you want to just dive into the rules of Crazy Aces and play for yourself, you can find them here: Crazy Aces Rules.

Capturing the heart of Crazy Eights

Crazy Eights is a wildly accessible game that almost anyone can play with a very easy learning curve. Even your pets might want to play!

She justs wants to be the center of attention.

While prototyping rules changes to Crazy Eights, I first let myself kinda go wild, trying multiple mechanics and concepts that deviated considerably from the core ruleset of the game. In the end, however, it became clear that I needed to keep things simple and just add a few choice rules to enhance the core of the game, without radically reimagining it, else I would risk ruining what makes the game special.

And given I have a small amount of time I can dedicate to designing each game in this challenge, I simply don't have time to overcomplicate things anyway!

With that in mind, I focused on enhancing the game's core mechanics: discarding, drawing, and hand management. This is what makes Crazy Eights (and by extension Crazy Aces) special.

That all started with fixing the endgame.

Redesigning the endgame

The gameplay of Crazy Eights is very linear, making the endgame kind of boring. There's no way to force your opponent into defeat through skillful play, and the one-card-at-a-time play limits the potential for surprising victories in the face of defeat.

The closest there is to this is when you save an Eight to play as your penultimate card, declaring your final card's suit as the next suit to play. Unfortunately, your opponent could simply keep drawing cards until they too found an Eight to change the suit and prevent you from winning.

Therefore, the only reliable way to win the game was to find and hoard at least one Eight in your hand such that you would eventually end up with an Eight as your final card, which your opponent can't prevent you from playing.

This is pretty monotonous and gets boring quickly.

To fix this problem, I started with a simple rule: if you reached a maximum hand size, you lost the game. This addressed the issue of being able to get out of a situation where your opponent played an Eight as their penultimate card, and you go to fish out an Eight of your own to prevent them from winning, for if you have to draw too many cards to do so, you will lose.

If you reach the maximum hand size, you automatically lose

This hand size is set to the number of cards in a suit (13 for a normal deck, 15 for the ZSA deck) minus 1. If you reach that number of cards in your hand, you lose automatically.

This single rule dramatically improved the endgame and ended up being the only change to the endgame rules that I kept, but I did experiment with some other things too.

A new win condition that didn't work

The idea was to balance the risk of carrying a large number of cards in your hand with being able to win. I was hoping to encourage you to save certain cards and play around them, further constraining your effective hand size. This was the idea:

If you manage to collect a three-of-a-kind, you win. So you would win the game if you collected three Sevens or three Kings, etc.

The idea was that to acquire a three-of-a-kind, you would likely have to draw many cards, bringing you closer to the ceiling where you lose the game and encouraging a risk/reward balance.

But when I tested this mechanic out in real games, it just didn't work. Getting a three-of-a-kind has a relatively high statistical likelihood once you reach ten cards in your hand (about 15%, actually), and it didn't effectively balance the risk/reward well. Rather than further tweaking this idea and trying to make it work, I realized that it was just taking away from the core of the game and muddying the rules.

So, I scrapped the idea and moved on without it.

In the end, the game didn't need this. Once the hand size limit was in place with some additional tweaks to the regular gameplay, the endgame felt much better and didn't drag out the same way the base game does.

Balancing variability and simplicity in the core ruleset

The other challenge with the core Crazy Eights ruleset is that the game can get a little rote after a few rounds of play. I wanted to add some variability and basic strategy, but I was also wary of polluting the game and making the rules too complex (after the mistaken approach to the three-of-a-kind rule).

To that end, I ended up with just a few new moves you can make during the regular course of taking your turn.

1. Turned one card (the Zero card in the ZSA deck, the Joker card in a regular deck with Jokers, or the King or Two card in a regular deck without them) into a Draw 2: the next player must draw two cards. Yes, I "stole" this mechanic from Uno. The drawing pressure pushes players closer to the hand limit.
2. When playing a same-number card, if two have already just been played under this one, then the player who played the last one must draw a card, and if three have already been played, then the player who played the last card must draw two cards.
3. If you have two number cards of the same suit with numbers next to each other (for instance, a 3 and 4 of hearts) and the player before you plays a number one above or below your set (of any suit), you can play both of your cards starting with the one next to the number the prior player played. To complete this example, your opponent plays a 5 of spades, and then you can play the 4 and then 3 of hearts on top of that card in one play.

(Playing a third number on top of an existing two numbers triggers your opponent to draw)

(You can play two cards if they are in a straight with the top card in the pile)

These rules, I found, add a nice sprinkle of strategy and decision-making to the gameplay but still keep the game simple and easy to play. They also play with the hand size limit rule nicely.

Again, if you want to see the full rules for yourself and play the game, you can find them here: Crazy Aces Rules.

Preview of the next game in the Card Game Design Challenge

I've set the goal of designing eight card games in 2025, and Crazy Eights was just the first. I've just about finished the design for the second game in this series at the time of writing this story, so I figured I'd give you a little sneak preview.

The game is called, tentatively, 5-Over-1s. It's a game about building apartments and scoring points. This is an original creation playable with the ZSA Deck or with a regular deck of cards (with modifications), and it's designed for two players.

In this game, you play your cards on building sites to cooperatively complete these sites and turn them into finished apartment buildings, which then get put to the side. Eventually, when players have run out of cards, the finished buildings get scored, and each player receives points based on their contributions.

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