How to use SkipBo card?

March 31, 2023 12:00 PM

When playing Skip Bo, is the Skip Bo card wild all the time or does it substitute for a specific number upon play?

If I play Skip Bo on a 3, do I need to play a 5 on top of that or can I play any card I want? The written rules are non-specific about how to play on top of a Skip Bo card, so I am assuming it’s truly wild but curious if common wisdom is otherwise.

posted by vunder to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (6 answers total)

The Skip Bo card "becomes" the card that would fit where you played it. So if you put it on a 3, it counts as a 4. In my house, we put it slightly to the side, so you could see the 3 and know that the Skip Bo card "is" a 4, and you have to put a 5 on it.
posted by Etrigan at 12:08 PM on March 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

I concur with everything Etrigan wrote. Source: Been playing Skip Bo for ~25 years.
posted by Night_owl at 12:21 PM on March 31, 2023

Thirding everything Etrigan wrote. It's wild in that it can be any number you need, but it's still played in consecutive numerical order.
posted by carlypennylane at 12:55 PM on March 31, 2023

Don't you HAVE to play the next card too? Like if you play a Skip-bo on a 3, you have to play the 5. You can't just leave the Skip-bo sitting there.

I don't play Skip-Bo but I play Spite and Malice a lot with my kids, which is like Skip-Bo with normal cards. When we play a wild we must play the next card too. Is this just a house rule and not a real rule?
posted by cmm at 3:28 PM on March 31, 2023

There is nothing in the Skip-Bo rules that says after playing a Skip-Bo you must also play the next card. I've never played that way, either.
posted by xedrik at 4:31 PM on March 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

Nth-ing that the way I've always played it is that once played, the skip-bo card becomes the value of the card that it would need to be in order for the play to be valid, and that the card placed on top of that must be played as if the card had that value and was not a skip-bo.

Granted, I guess you could play either way, but the strategy becomes stranger and less predictable if you treat it as wild after play and allow any card to be played on top of it. Most players would use it to immediately draw down their stock pile by one card, and there are enough skip-bos in the deck to potentially make that a game-breaking rule, I'd expect.
posted by Aleyn at 5:10 PM on March 31, 2023