Phase 10 Rules: How to Play, Score, and Win

These phase 10 rules cover the full commercial card game end to end: the deck, the deal, how a turn works, the complete table of all ten phases, scoring, and how a round and the game end. Phase 10 plays like a cross between rummy and a matching game — each round asks you to build one specific combination of sets and runs, called a Phase, before anyone else finishes theirs, using a deck of colored number cards plus Skip and Wild cards instead of a standard deck.

Phase 10 rules: how to play Phase 10 in a nutshell

This page describes the standard commercial Phase 10 card game for 2 to 6 players, the way it’s printed in the publisher’s own instructions, checked against an independently documented set of Phase 10 variations. Where a popular named variant or house rule changes something, that’s called out in the relevant section below instead of being folded in as if it were the only way to play.

The deck and the deal

A Phase 10 deck has 108 cards: 24 each of four colors (red, blue, yellow, and green), covering two copies of every number from 1 to 12 in each color, plus four Skip cards and eight Wild cards. Shuffle the whole deck and deal ten cards to every player, no matter how many people are at the table. Stack the rest face down in the middle as the draw pile, then flip its top card face up beside it to start the discard pile.

The diagram below shows that layout from above: each player’s ten-card hand sits at their own position around the table, the draw and discard piles sit together in the center, and play passes clockwise, one turn at a time.

How a turn works

On your turn, draw one card first, either the top card of the draw pile (face down, unknown) or the top card of the discard pile (face up, known) — except a Skip card, which can never be picked up from the discard pile. Once you’ve drawn, you may lay down that round’s Phase if your hand already has the cards for it; laying down is optional, so you can hold back and try again next turn if you’d rather.

After you’ve laid your own Phase down for the round, you can also hit: add extra matching cards from your hand onto any laid-down Phase already on the table, yours or an opponent’s, as long as the card you add genuinely extends it — another card of the matching number into a set, or the next or previous number in that run’s color onto a run. You can only hit during your own turn, never between turns. A Skip card can never be used to build or extend a Phase; discard it instead to force a specific opponent to lose their next turn entirely. A Wild card stands in for any color or number you’re missing, in a set, in a run, or toward the all-one-color phase. Finish your turn by discarding one card face up, unless you’ve just gone out by playing your last card onto a Phase instead.

The ten phases

Phases must be attempted in order, one per round, and this table is the whole game plan — get it right and the rest of the rules fall into place around it.

Phase	Requirement
1	2 sets of 3
2	1 set of 3 + 1 run of 4
3	1 set of 4 + 1 run of 4
4	1 run of 7
5	1 run of 8
6	1 run of 9
7	2 sets of 4
8	7 cards of one color
9	1 set of 5 + 1 set of 2
10	1 set of 5 + 1 set of 3

A “set” is a group of cards that all show the same number, in any mix of colors. A “run” is a sequence of consecutive numbers, also in any mix of colors. Wild cards can fill either role, standing in for whatever number a set or run needs at that position.

Scoring

The player who goes out in a round scores nothing. Every other player tallies penalty points for whatever is still sitting in their hand when the round ends: 5 points for each numbered card from 1 to 9, 10 points for each numbered card from 10 to 12, 15 points for each Skip card, and 25 points for each Wild card. Cards already laid down or hit onto a Phase are safe no matter their value — only what’s still in hand at the final whistle counts against you.

Tracking everyone’s phase and running score by hand gets hard to read fast once a few rounds have gone by. Use the printable Phase 10 score sheet to fill it in online or print a blank copy for the table — it keeps each player’s current phase and total straight for you.

How a round and the game end

A round ends the instant a player plays their last card, whether that’s by discarding it or by hitting it onto a laid-down Phase. Anyone who laid down their required Phase that round advances to attempt the next phase in the next round; anyone who didn’t must try that exact same phase again rather than moving on. There’s no skipping ahead and no banking a completed phase early — the sequence from Phase 1 through Phase 10 is fixed for every player.

The game itself ends the moment someone both lays down Phase 10 and goes out in that same round — that player wins outright. If more than one player manages to finish Phase 10 in the same round, the lowest cumulative score across all the rounds played decides it; if those players are still tied even then, just the tied players replay Phase 10 against each other to settle the game.

Common variations and house rules

The base rules above are widely standardized, but plenty of named variants circulate among players, documented independently alongside the official game. “Super Wild Phase 10” lets a Skip card either skip the next player or reverse the direction of play, the discarding player’s choice, and adds a “Super Skip” that skips every other player at once and costs 25 points if it’s still in your hand at the end. Some home tables also relax the rule against hitting out of turn, or let a player announce a Phase before actually laying it down — neither is part of the official rules, so it’s worth agreeing up front which version your table is using.

If you like the clock-against-everyone-else tension of building melds under pressure, the tile-matching in dominoes and the set-collecting in mahjong reward a similar kind of forward planning, even though neither uses cards at all.