A game of pushing your luck onto other people. Every turn ends by drawing a card, some of those cards are bombs, and the only thing standing between you and the exit is a Defuse you may not have. Two to five players.
This is elimination, not scoring: there is no points table and no rounds. Players go out one at a time and the last one left wins. What makes it a game rather than a coin flip is that almost every card lets you change whose turn it is, what is on top of the deck, or whether the last thing that happened counts at all.
Everyone starts with eight cards, one of which is a Defuse. On your turn you may play as many action cards as you like — or none — and then you must draw one card from the deck. Drawing ends your turn.
That last sentence is the whole game. Your turn does not end when you want it to; it ends when you take a card you cannot see. Everything else is an attempt to avoid that, delay it, or arrange for somebody else to do it more often than you.
Play the Defuse and you survive. You then put the bomb back into the deck yourself, secretly, anywhere you like — top, bottom or any position between.
That secret placement is the most under-used decision in the game. Putting it straight back on top hands it to the very next player, which is obvious and often correct. Burying it deep protects everyone equally, including the people you are trying to beat. Putting it second or third from the top is the play that survives an Attack.
There are more Defuses in the deck than bombs, but they are not distributed evenly — and once yours is spent, every single draw for the rest of the game is a real risk.
| Card | What it does |
|---|---|
| Defuse | Survive a bomb and place it back in the deck secretly. |
| Skip | End your turn without drawing. |
| Attack | End your turn without drawing — and the next player takes two turns. |
| Targeted Attack | The same, but you choose who takes them. |
| Nope | Cancel any action card. Playable at any moment, including on somebody else's turn. |
| Favor | Force a player to hand you a card — they choose which. |
| Shuffle | Shuffle the draw pile. Everything anyone knew about it is gone. |
| See the Future | Peek at the top 3 cards — or 5, on the bigger version. |
| Alter the Future | Peek at the top 3 or 5 and rearrange them. |
| Draw from Bottom | Take your card from the other end of the deck instead. |
| Swap Top & Bottom | Exchange the first and last cards of the pile. |
| Super Skip | End every remaining turn you owe, without drawing any of them. |
| Pair cards | Worth nothing alone. Play two matching ones to steal a card from another player. |
Some tables also play with an expansion set, which the host turns on in the lobby. It adds cards that mark a card in somebody's hand as visible, let you hold a bomb without dying, recover discards, or copy the card played before yours.
A Nope cancels an action card outright, and it can be played by anyone, at any time, including out of turn. A Nope can be Noped — which un-cancels the original — and that can be Noped again.
There is a short window after each action for anyone to answer, so the game has a rhythm no other game here has: a card is played, and for a couple of seconds nobody knows whether it happened.
The practical consequence is that a Nope in hand is worth more than almost anything else, and holding one is usually better than spending it on the first mildly annoying thing somebody does. Save it for an Attack you cannot survive, or a Favor that takes your last Defuse.
The bombs do not change, and the deck only gets smaller. Early on a draw is nearly free; with six cards left and two bombs among them it is a coin flip. Spend Skips late, not early — they are worth most when the odds are worst.
When you defuse, think about what the next player can do. On top is the obvious answer, but a player who Skips or Attacks dodges it completely and hands it back to the table. Two or three cards down catches the person who thinks they escaped.
Peeking and then drawing anyway wastes the card. Peek at the start of your turn, so that if the top card is a bomb you still have the whole turn to Skip or Attack out of it.
The other player chooses which card you get, so you will not be handed their Defuse. Its real use is thinning a dangerous hand — take from the player who is hoarding, and count what leaves.
With one opponent, every Attack comes straight back and the deck runs down fast. Skips become far more valuable than Attacks, and the bomb you hide is one only your opponent can find.
Finishing order is the order players were knocked out, so surviving longer pays even when you do not win.
| Finish | Points |
|---|---|
| Winner | 3 |
| Anywhere else in the top half of the table | 1 |
| Below halfway | 0 |
Half is rounded up, so at five players the top three score. At a table of two, second place is the loss and pays nothing — and a match somebody walks out of pays the other player nothing at all, while the one who left still takes the defeat. That rule exists because two accounts taking turns to quit would otherwise be a way to manufacture wins.