Spicy Uno: a new twist to an old favorite

Spicy Uno offers a more enjoyable, interactive game for those who enjoy fast paced action. This version of Uno will keep you on your toes, with additions of hand-eye coordination and the power of silence.

The materials needed to play Spicy Uno are an original uno deck and a couple friends or family members.

All standard Uno rules are used to play, but Spicy Uno adds a few more create an increasingly lively challenge for a larger group. The usual end goal of getting rid of all your cards and calling out “Uno” when you have one card stay the same. However, cards of seven, six and zero hold special abilities and create chaos not seen in regular uno.

The standard rules for the original Uno game are simple and straightforward. At the start of the game, all players draw seven cards, five if you are playing with five or more people, and flip one over from the top of the deck in the middle of everyone as the starting card.

No special rules in this game specify who plays first, which leaves the choice to the players. If the starting card is a special card, it’s ability fails to activate, but every special card afterward plays as normal.

In the original version, players only play a card if it has the same color or symbol as the most recent card played by the previous player with a few exceptions.

The exceptions include wild cards, which are black and do not have a numbers, and wild draw-fours, which are the same as wilds except the next player has to draw four cards. Both of these cards may be played on a players turn at will, but wild draw-fours can only be played when a player cannot play any other cards. The other special cards from the original game include draw twos, reverses and skips. 

If anyone plays a six, regardless of color, everyone has to slap the six and the last one to slap it draws two cards. Sevens, known as the silent seven. When a player plays this card everyone playing has to remain silent. If a player talks before another seven is played, they draw two cards.

The following podcast features homeschooler Gannon Ganzenhuber, ’21, a long time player of the original uno game, sharing his favorite aspect of Spicy Uno.

The next rule allows players the ability to aid each other instead of having to draw a card. If someone can not play a card on their turn, the other players are allowed to “gift” a card to play instead of drawing a card from the pile, but the person who is gifting the card could be lying to add cards to their opponents hand, and lessen their own.

If a player plays a green two and someone out of order also has a green two, they may play theirs out of turn because it is the exact same card. This rule applies to wilds and wild draw-fours.

Another new addition is stacking draw cards. In the original game, if a player played a draw two or draw four, the next person was out of luck, unable to do anything about it.

In Spicy Uno, if someone plays a draw two the person who would have drawn the cards gets the chance to play their own draw two and give the next player four cards. These additions can continue as long as players keep playing draw two cards and can be done with draw-fours as well.

The last card ability addition is the zero. The zero card allows the player who played it to swap hands with any other player of their choice, but if a player swaps hands with a person who has uno they also have to say uno once they switch. 

The final twist to the game is the opportunity for the victor of the round to sign their final card.

As a veteran of the original game, Ganzenhuber shares his favorite addition and arch nemesis in the game. He also shares his recommendation for the game.

“My favorite addition to the game is the sevens,” Ganzenhuber said. “It made the game a lot more challenging for me personally, because I am a very verbal person. I would definitely recommend this game for people and is a nice change for those who have played the game many times.”

One way Spicy Uno improved on the original is the addition of powers for number cards. Just having the skips, reverses and draw twos made it feel like nothing exciting happened very often. However, Spicy Uno sometimes gets really confusing and hard to follow.

To read more articles look at Journalist explores the importance of community or How to make an infographic using Canva.

Cohl Obwald can be reached via email or Twitter.