Wild: A "Wild" card may be used in place of a number card, and can be used as any color to complete any phase. Original print runs of Phase 10 had two Wilds in each color; to reduce confusion, current print runs use black Wilds.
- More than one “Wild” card may be used in completing a Phase. Players can use as many “Wild” cards as they want as long as they use one natural card.
- Once a "Wild" card has been played in a Phase, it cannot be replaced by the intended card and used elsewhere. It must remain as that card until the hand is over.
- If the dealer starts the discard pile with a "Wild" card, the card may be picked up by the first player.
- A "Wild" card may not be used as a "skip" card.
Skip: Skip cards have only one purpose: to cause another player to lose a turn. To use, a player discards the "Skip" card on their turn and chooses the player who will lose a turn.
- When a "Skip" card is drawn it may be discarded immediately or saved for a later turn.
- A "Skip" card may never be picked up from the discard pile.
- A "Skip" card cannot be used to complete any phase, including Phase 8 (7 cards of one color). The original print runs of Phase 10 had blue Skip cards, causing confusion with normal blue cards in the deck; Skip cards are now black in current editions.
- Any player can be skipped, not just the person who would normally play next.
- A player cannot be skipped twice in the same round; they must lose turn in the round before being skipped again. (They can be skipped twice in a row but not until their turn passes)
The object of the game is to be the first person to complete all 10 phases. In the case of two players completing the last phase in the same hand, the player with the lowest score out of the tied players is the winner. If those scores also happen to be tied, a tiebreaker round is played where the tying players attempt to complete phase 10 (or in variants, the last phase each player had tried to complete in the previous round).
For each hand, each player's object is to complete and lay down the current phase, and then rid their hand of remaining cards by discarding them on laid-down Phases, called "hitting". The player who does this first wins the hand and scores no penalty; all other players earn penalty points according to the value of cards remaining in their hand.
There are 108 cards in a deck:
96 numbered cards:
- 2 of each value from 1-12, in each of four colors. Therefore, there are 24 cards of each color and 8 of each value.
- 8 Wild cards;
- 4 Skip cards;
With two regular decks of cards, the suits can represent the 4 different colors, kings wild, and jokers skip.
Phase 10 is a card game created in 1982 by Kenneth Johnson and originally sold by Fundex Games, now a subsidiary of Mattel. Phase 10 is based on a variant of rummy known as Liverpool Rummy, and is a member (along with Liverpool) of the contract rummy family. It requires a special deck or two regular decks of cards; it can be played by two to six people. The game is named after the ten phases (or melds) that a player must advance through in order to win. Phase 10 is Fundex's best selling product, selling 32,658,846 units to date, making it the 2nd best-selling commercial card game behind Mattel's Uno. In December 2010, Fundex sold the rights to Phase 10 to Mattel, and now develops and markets a line of games based on brands and other IP formerly exclusive to Mattel as well as Fundex's own brands.
