A game mostly of chance, but one where you need to think anyway. By Eric Pederson

2-6 players.

This document is also available as an Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf)

A special set of 64 cards each of which has a number & a letter on it as follows. (You can find a Word97 document containing some cards you can print on heavy stock at: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~epederso/eights/Cards.doc.)

1: e e i o t n r v

2: e e i o f n v g

3: e e i t f n s g

4: e e i t h n v w

5: e e o t f r s x

6: e e o t h s v u

7: e i o t h s r u

8: e i o f h r w x

Shuffle the cards and draw cards until you have one card for each suit. For example 1e 2i 3g 4e 5o 6s 7v 8i. Place these face up on the table where all players can see them. Reshuffle the other cards.

For 2 players, deal each 8 cards face down. For 3 or 4 players, deal each 7 cards face down.

The remaining cards are placed face down in a stack to be drawn from later.

The player clockwise of dealer plays first and play proceeds clockwise.

Each player attempts to combine the letters of the cards in their hand and on the table to spell one of the words "ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, or EIGHT". Any combination of cards may be used, with the following restrictions: 1) At least one -- and possibly all -- of the letters must come from the table. 2) Any letter taken from the table must be replaced by a card from the hand which has the same number. This replacing card cannot be one of the cards used in spelling the chosen word. In effect, each player will start and end their turn with one card of each of the numbered suits on the table.

The spelled word is placed before each player and the player draws enough unplayed cards to bring the hand back to the original starting number (6, 7 or 8 depending on the number of players).

Each spelled word is worth the number of points that it spells. For example, FOUR is worth 4 points.

Only one word (or no word) may be spelled per turn. If players cannot spell a word on their turn, they simply pass. A player who passes may place any number of cards from their hand on the bottom of the stack and replace them from the top of the stack. If the stack becomes exhausted, play continues without each player replacing their played cards.

When all players pass, the hand is finished and the points for each player is totaled. Several hands may make up a game. The eight cards left on the board from the previous hand are used as the starting array for the next hand.

A suggested total to win a game is 50 points for 2-3 players and 30 points for 4 or more players.

© 1999, Eric Pederson. You may freely copy this file as long as it is not changed and the copyright attribution remains intact. The cards for this game can be found at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~epederso/eights/Cards.doc (A Word97 file, I'll make a .pdf file some day.)