Just Curious: House Rules?
We recently bought a deck of Uno cards. My two oldest boys are at the stage where they love to play games, but aren’t quite old enough to play them independently.
Uno is a bit more tolerable than some games out there targeted at kids only. Right?
Here’s the issue. When it came time to play, Nate and I differed on the rules. Forget what the instructions say… I’m just saying that he and I grew up playing two different ways.
He plays that you never, ever get to “stack” on someone. If the person before you plays a “draw two,” you draw two. There’s no playing another “draw two” on top of theirs so the next person has to draw four. He’s not having that.
I grew up stacking. If you could get all the way around the table and someone had to draw 16, GREAT!
Also, he says you have to be completely out of the color being played in order to use a wild card. I’ve never played that way. If the person next to me and already said “Uno” and I had a draw four, I slammed it on them.
I guess he has much more mercy than my family. 
We also played that if you did not have a playable card, you had to draw and keep drawing until you got one you could play. This could make your hand huge in no time!
Anyway, here’s my question… what “house rules” do you have for Uno? Please share!!
October 30th, 2008 at 5:34 am
I’m just a passerby… but what a great time for me to pass by! I learned Uno while working in a daycare and we played it just like you do. The only thing is, we called it “Uno Trains” which was different from original Uno where there’s no stacking of the cards. So everytime we played, we voted on if we wanted to play Uno or Uno Trains which gave us some variety. Also in Uno Train, there’s the option to add in the rule that if you’re putting down a 4, for example, you can put down ALL your 4’s in that play, but that does confuse things a little.
Now having said all that, I started having my family play Uno on vacations and my mom makes us read the directions to everything. That’s when I found out that I was playing wrong! You really are supposed to only draw one if you don’t have a card you can play. My opinion? It’s much more fun the ‘wrong’ way! The wild card part, however, we never did. We play it whenever we want…. plus no one else should know what’s in your hand anyways to know if you’re out of the color card. Basically, I think you should keep playing it your way!
October 30th, 2008 at 7:17 am
i don’t know if this will help your side of the dispute
but i have never heard of stacking on someone. if the person before me lays a draw two, i draw two then my turn is done. the next person gets to go.
as for a wild card: if you have a regular wild card, you can play that at any time regardless if you’re out of a color or not. however, if you have a draw four, you can only play that if you are out of the color currently being played.
if you don’t have a playable card, you draw one. if you cannot play it, it is the next person’s turn.
so, i think i just agreed with nate on all of the rules, sorry about that. trevor and i used to play uno all of the time (before avery
) we even had the uno game where the little machine spits cards out at you. in order to eliminate any arguments on our end since we were very competitive, we read the rules very carefully. i think we might have taken a lot of the fun out of it 
have fun, it is a great family game!!!!
October 30th, 2008 at 8:44 am
It’s been awhile since I played Uno with my family, but I vaguely remember the following:
No stacking. However, if the person in front of me put down a Draw Two, I took my two cards, but I still got to play a card so I could then turn around and give the player after me a Draw Two. They would only have to pick two cards though.
Wild cards, of any size, can be played whenever. If they happened to be played in front of a person with an Uno, even better.
If you can’t play a card, you keep picking cards until you have one to play.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:25 am
I think we played that you could use the wild cards anytime but other times I have played it and people said that I couldn’t use them anytime!!! My family was tough and then I married Roger and HIS family! Talk about cut throat!!! Now I try to just watch them play their games!
Regarding a prior post about your homeschool name…I think what you have come up with is awesome! The first time I homeschooled, I called our school “Rose Cottage Homeschool.”
Beth
(I was homeschooling only our girls so I could get away with that sissy name!) THIS time, I didn’t have a choice!! The state (the same state as yours….) decided that we are to be called The Bower Academy. I prefer the Rose Cottage name, myself! (We had been watching the Anne of Green Gables series when we came up with that one!)
I miss your mama’s email while she’s away!!!!
October 31st, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I would tend to follow the printed rules, whatever they may be. Just don’t let them get in the way of having family time and fun. We tried to play Canasta with another couple and we had so many disagreements on the rules that we never tried it again. We use to play that all the time with my Grampa.
November 1st, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Ok, just a word in my “defense.” Our family played “speed UNO” all the time when I was growing up. Even the adults during Christmas get-togethers. That is where you can “stack” draw two’s, play multiple cards (as long as they were the same color and number) in one turn and even play out of turn if you had the same color / number as the last card played. However, as fun as they are, these house rules seem only to be a way to make the game more interesting and competitive. Strategies are different and more complicated. When teaching our kids, I only wanted to keep it “by the rules” because this is one of the first strategy games they’ve been exposed to. Besides, they’re extremely competitive anyway and playing by the rules tones it down a bit. Also, stacking draw two’s on a 4 year old seems a bit cruel, even if he did just say “UNO.”
November 2nd, 2008 at 8:03 am
HEY! I told you (Nate) that you could only leave a comment if you followed it up with some glowing comment about your wife…. Who’s not playing by the rules now?