Phase 10

Phase 10 is a card game created in 1982 by Kenneth Johnson and sold by Mattel, which purchased the rights from Fundex Games in 2010. 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 ten phases (or melds) that a player must advance through in order to win. Phase 10 was Fundex’s best selling product, selling over 32,600,000 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. There is a new version called “Phase 10 Mod” that comes in a yellow and white case or a newer case that is blue, a green and yellow stripe and bits of red on the front and back If the player lays down their phase and are out of cards and a player has a phase after them, they can still lay that hand down. The person at the end of the game with the most points wins.

The object of the game is to be the first person to complete all ten phases. In the case of two players completing the last phase in the same hand, the player who completed the last phase with the lowest overall score is the winner. If those scores also happen to be tied, a tiebreaker round is played where the tying players attempt to complete phase ten (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 one hundred and eight cards in a deck: ninety-six numbered cards: two of each value from one through twelve, in each of four colors. Therefore, there are 24 cards of each color and eight of each value. eight Wild cards; four Skip cards; With two regular decks of cards, the suits can represent the four different colors, kings can represent the wild cards, and jokers can represent the skip cards.