How to play Uno – rules to play Uno, Flip, and Attack

You’re here to learn how to play Uno, so let’s get started. Created in 1971, the iconic Uno card game is still a global bestseller over half a century later because it’s dead easy, quick to learn, and hilarious to play. This guide will teach you the basic Uno game rules – explaining all the Uno card rules with pictures along the way.  We’ll also go over the best alternative versions, including Uno Flip, Uno Attack, and Uno All Wild.

If learning this fast and furious classic gets you hankering for more, check out our guides to the best card games and best board games in the whole world.

How to play Uno

What is Uno?

If you’re totally new to the game, let’s start at the beginning (square uno, if you will), and go over the facts.

It’s a simple, fast paced card game which has two types of cards:
Number cards from one to nine, colored red, blue, green, and yellow
Special cards, which trigger powerful effects in the game (including multicolored Uno Wild cards).

Basic Uno rules – how to set up and play a game

Uno setup

Before play, here’s how to set up your first game:

1. Shuffle the deck thoroughly.
2. Deal seven cards to each player, face down.
3. Put the remaining cards in the middle of the table, also faced down, to create the draw pile.
4. Flip the top card of the draw pile over and place it face up next to the draw pile – this will become your discard pile.
5. Choose which player will start – it’s easiest to pick either the player to the left of the dealer, or the youngest player for this.

How to play (and win)

Each round in the game of Uno is all about getting rid of all the cards in your hand. You want to be playing down a card every turn, picking up cards as little as possible, and forcing your opponents to pick up cards so you stay in the lead. Here’s how it works:

1. Take turns to play a card from your hand down onto the discard pile.
2. On your turn, you can play either a number card or a special card.
3. If you play a number card, it must match either the number or the color of the card currently on top of the discard pile. This doesn’t have any effect, but you complete your turn one card closer to victory!
4. If you play a special card, it doesn’t have to match anything, but does something special (we’ll explain all the Uno card rules in just a moment).
5. If your turn comes up, and you don’t have a card in your hand you can play, you must draw one card from the draw pile, and play passes to the next player.
6. If your hand is reduced to one card, you must immediately shout ‘Uno’ to declare that you’ve nearly emptied your hand. If you don’t shout ‘Uno’ and someone notices your mistake before the next player begins their turn, you have to draw four more cards as a penalty. If you forget to shout ‘Uno’ and no one catches you out, you don’t need to draw any more cards.
7. As soon as someone plays the last card in their hand, the round is over, that player wins, and they count up their points as explained below.

Scoring

A full game of Uno is played over multiple rounds, with the winner collecting points after each round based on all the cards remaining in the other players’ hands when the round ends. The overall winner is the first player to reach 500 points total.

Here’s how many points each Uno card is worth when scoring:

Uno card rules with pictures

Apart from the regular number cards, the game has six special cards (including three Uno wild cards) which each have a powerful effect you can use to wrong-foot your opponents. They are:

Here’s how each of them works in the game.

Uno Reverse card

When you play a Reverse card, the direction of play switches round, from clockwise to anticlockwise, or vice versa. Playing one of these will surprise your opponents – especially the player before you, who now has to play again right away. Like all the special cards, it’s especially powerful if the player after you is down to one card – reversing play buys time for the other players a chance to force the leader to pick up cards.

Uno Skip card

Playing a Skip card forces the next player to miss their turn, with play passing to the next person along. Always useful, but – like Reverse – it’s especially powerful if the player after you is close to winning.

Uno Draw 2 card

Playing a Draw 2 card is like a Skip, only better – not only will the next player after you have to miss their turn to play a card, they have to draw two cards from the draw pile.

Uno Wild card

The Uno Wild card rules are simple – this card has all four colors on it, so:

• You can play it regardless of the last card played.
• You decide what color it will count as, and the next player has to match that color (but can play any number they have in that color).

Uno Wild Draw 4 card

Wild Draw 4 works exactly the same as the regular Uno Wild card, but is far more powerful, because after you decide the new color of play, the next player has to draw four cards from the draw pile and miss their turn.

Uno Wild Shuffle Hands card

A new card added to the most recent editions of Uno, the Wild Shuffle Hands card is a complete game reset that can put the previous leader in last place, and leave struggling players much better off.

When you play this card, you take all the cards currently in every player’s hand, shuffle them all together, and then deal them all out again, one to each player, going around the group in order, until they’re all dealt.

Everyone will end up with roughly similar hand sizes, but totally different cards – helping stragglers+ to catch up, and setting back players who had been close to victory. Delicious.

How to play Uno Flip

Uno Flip is a wildly popular alternative version of Uno that makes things a lot more chaotic. It plays exactly like the regular version of Uno, except that every card in the deck has both a Light Side and a Dark Side, like the Force in Star Wars, or the depths of the human subconscious mind.

Play starts using the Light Side, with special cards dealing out lighter penalties than regular Uno – the Draw 2 card becomes Draw 1, and the Wild Draw 4 becomes Wild Draw 2.

But as soon as someone plays the new Uno Flip card, everybody has to turn their hand of cards over and start using the Dark Side, where all the special card effects are turned up to 11. The Dark Side has cards like Draw 5 and Skip Everyone (not just the next player misses their turn, but every other player, allowing you to take a double turn. It’s gnarly stuff, and we love it.

How to play Uno Attack

Uno Attack – called Uno Extreme for the delicate sensibilities of customers in the UK and Canada – is an action-focused version of Uno that comes with a battery-powered card launcher (yes, you read that correctly).

It plays like regular Uno, except you load the draw pile into the card launcher, and every time you would draw a card from the pile in Uno, you instead press a button on the machine, and it shoots out a random number of cards for you to pick up.

Special cards double down on that increased randomness of play – like Wild All Hit, which forces every player (except you) to press the button and pick up all the cards that shoot out!

How to play Uno All Wild

What if all the Uno cards were Uno Wild cards? That’s not a preposterous thought experiment, it’s the premise of real live spin-off card game Uno All Wild.

Like the other alternate versions you can buy, the basic rules are the same as regular Uno, but this edition is much simpler to play because all cards are Wild cards, so nobody needs to worry about the color and number restrictions.

Games are faster because you can /always/ play something – but there’s also more intense, targeted player interaction, because the only way you pick up cards is when you’re hit by another player’s special card. There’s also a couple of new specials in the mix, like Wild Targeted Draw Two – which lets you choose a player to draw, instead of it having to be the next player in line – and Wild Forced Swap, which has you pick a player to swap hands with – brutal.

Where to buy Uno

Uno is one of those games you can find on sale just about anywhere – but, as always, if you’re looking to pick up a copy, we’d recommend supporting your local game store by buying it there.

If you need one right away, though, you can support your friendly local Wargamer Dot Com by buying from Amazon via the buttons below.

How to play Uno Online

It’s the 21st century, you guys – we have a bunch of different ways to play Uno online now.

The absolute easiest way is the free Uno browser game on Mattel’s website.  This lets you jump straight into a quickfire, three minute round of Uno versus AI. It’s nothing fancy, but it works great, and gives you simple, neat visual cues showing when special cards have been played, and highlighting which cards in your hand you can play. It’s a surprisingly fun, accessible way for a beginner to learn the ropes.

For a more in-depth experience versus actual humans, with more features, unlockables and whatnot, try Mattel’s official, free Uno mobile game, available on iOS and Android.

Uno FAQs

Still have questions about the game of Uno? We’ve got you covered.

How many cards to play Uno?

There are 112 cards in the standard Uno deck currently on sale. That includes:

• 76 number cards – 19 in each of the four Uno colors
• 24 special cards – each color has two Skip cards, two Draw 2 cards, and two Reverse cards
• 4 Wild cards
• 4 Wild Draw 4 cards
• 1 Wild Shuffle Hands card
• 3 blank cards for house rules

Do you have to play a card if you can?

No, the rules make it clear you can choose to pick up a card even if you’re holding one you could have played – so if you think it’s better to wait to play that Wild in your hand, you can totally do that.

What happens when a player forgets to shout Uno?

If you fail to shout Uno when your hand reaches one card left, and another player calls you on it, you have to pick up four cards from the draw pile. If the next player starts their turn before anyone calls you on it, though, you don’t have to pick up four (this time).

Can you end the round with a special card?

Yes! And if the card you play is a Draw 2 or a Wild Draw 4, the next player must pick up those cards before the round ends, so those cards will add to your bounty of points for winning the round. Nice.

If you’ve given Uno a whirl and fancy trying something new, we’ve got some recommendations in our guides to the best card games for adults and the best bluffing card games.

Source: Wargamer