3 Player Card Games: Easy Games for Three With a Standard Deck

Many card games are written for four players or two, which leaves three people at the table fiddling with the rules. The games below work with three, and each section says how to deal and score for three players. They use a standard 52-card deck. Further down are more advanced three-player games, and two browser games for when you have no deck.

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Quick pick

Game	Best for	Difficulty
Crazy Eights	A quick game, all ages	Easy
Go Fish	Children	Very easy
Rummy	Everyone	Easy
Hearts	Trick-taking fans	Medium

Crazy Eights

Deal: five cards each. The rest of the deck becomes the face-down stock, and you turn the top card up to start the discard pile. (With two players it is seven each.)

Play: starting to the dealer's left and moving clockwise, play a card that matches the top discard by rank or suit, or play an eight. An eight can go on anything, and you name the suit the next player has to follow. If you cannot or do not want to play, draw one card.

Winning: the first player to empty their hand wins. The others score points for the cards still in hand: 50 for an eight, 10 for a face card, and face value for the rest (an ace is 1).

House rules: a common version makes a queen skip the next player and an ace reverse the direction. Agree on them before you start.

Go Fish

Deal: seven cards each with two or three players. The rest go in a pile called the pond.

Play: on your turn, ask any player for a rank you hold ("Do you have any fives?"). If they have some, they give you all of them. If not, they say "Go fish" and you draw from the pond. You lay down a book whenever you hold all four cards of a rank. The most books wins.

For the full rules, see how to play Go Fish.

Rummy

Deal: seven cards each with three players. Turn up the next card to start the discard pile, and leave the rest as the stock.

Melds: a set is three or four cards of the same rank. A run is three or more consecutive cards of the same suit, with aces low.

Turn: draw one card, from the stock or from the discard pile. You may lay down a meld, and you may add cards to melds already on the table, including other players' melds. Then discard one card face up. You cannot discard the card you just picked up from the discard pile.

Going out: you win the hand when you get rid of all your cards by melding, laying off, or discarding. The others add up the cards left in their hands (face cards 10, aces 1, other cards face value), and that total goes to the winner's score. Agree on a target score before you start.

Rummy with two players is covered in how to play rummy with 2 players.

Hearts

Hearts is a trick-taking game where you want to avoid points. It works well with three, with a small change to the deck.

Deal: take the 2 of diamonds out of the deck, leaving 51 cards, and deal 17 to each player.

Passing: pass cards before each hand, in a cycle such as left, right, then hold (no pass). A simpler cycle of left and right also works.

Play: the player with the 2 of clubs leads it. You must follow the suit led if you can. The highest card of the suit led wins the trick and leads the next. You cannot lead hearts until a heart has been played on an earlier trick, unless you have only hearts.

Scoring: each heart you take is 1 penalty point, and the queen of spades is 13. If one player takes every penalty card, they have "shot the moon": either 26 points come off their score, or every other player gets 26. The game ends when someone reaches 100 points, and the lowest score wins.

For the two-player version, read how to play Hearts with 2 players.

More games for three

If you already like cards and want to learn a new game, these are recommended for three players by the card game reference site Pagat:

• Dou Dizhu, a climbing game from China where one player, the landlord, plays against the other two.
• Skat, Germany's national game, a trick-taking game with 32 cards where a bidder plays alone against the other two.
• Skitgubbe, a Swedish game that starts as trick-taking and ends as a shedding game. The last player holding cards loses.
• Ninety-Nine, a trick-taking game for 36 cards in which players bid using three of their twelve cards.

Play 3 player card games online

• Rummy Multiplayer. On this device you pick 2, 3 or 4 players. The game explains the rules in four screens before the first hand. Each player gets 10 cards and the first to 100 points wins.
• UNO Game. Supports two, three or four people. Match the top card by colour or number, use special cards to block the others, and announce your last card.

For all the three-person options, including non-card games, see 3 player games. With only two people, see 2 player card games.