Justin Blaske

While grabbing a couple villages will surely help spur you forward, they won’t help you win the game if you spend too much time focusing on them, and not buying other actions that will actually propel you forward.

There’s nothing worse than drawing 2 Villages and only ending up with 3 Coins to spend for the turn, because you weren’t able to dig into anything other than villages, point cards and coppers.

We always play this way in our home, and anybody we introduce this method to love it. It makes Uno much more engaging and fun for all levels of players, plus adds a little dash of strategy into the game.

Warning: Playing Uno this way, makes the standard by the book method rather mundane.

There are 2 major changes to the rules to play this:

Rule 1: All special cards can be stacked upon each other (Color does not mater), and draws are cumulative. Also, the game does not end until there are no more reactions to a special card. This means if a player plays a plain wild as thier last card, if the players can react to that and get some draws back to the potentially winning player, that player ends up drawing and not winning the game, and play continues.

Example:

Bob, Sally, Jane and Frank are all playing. It’s Bob’s turn, he plays a Draw 2, It’s now Sally’s turn, and rather than drawing two, she plays a Draw 4 Wild. Now its Jane’s turn and she’s looking down the barrel of drawing 6 cards. Jane decides to play a Skip, which means her play counts, then the skip jumps over Frank and we are back to Bob. Bob has no more special cards and ends up drawing 6 cards.

Rule 2: When any player plays a 0 card, all players pass their hands to the next player in the direction of play. As soon as a 0 is played, any other player, outside of turn order, may play another 0 to stop the rotation. As long as a 0 is on the top of the pile, any player may play a zero to start/stop the rotating of hands. Once the 0 plays have stopped, the person next next in line according to the direction of play, from the last person to play a 0 goes.

Example:

Bob, Sally, Jane and Frank are all playing. It’s Bob’s turn, he plays a 0, Frank would be passing his hand to Bob, and he only has 2 cards left (one of which is a 0) so he plays that 0 card to stop the rotation of hands (Remembering to say “Uno!”). Bob was prepared for this, and plays a second 0 card, nobody else elects to play a 0 card, and so hands pass Bob gets the new hand from Frank, but forgets to say “Uno!” and somebody catches him on it and he draws his cards. Play now continues at Sally, since Bob was the last to play a 0.