Garbage

How to play Garbage: the rules

1. The deal. Each player gets ten cards face down in two rows of five. These are your places: the top row is for the ace, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and the bottom row for the 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Nobody looks at them. The rest of the cards are the deck.
2. Draw a card. On your turn, draw the top card of the deck. If the card on top of the discard pile fits one of your places, you may take that card instead.
3. Put it in its place. A card from ace to 10 goes face up in its own place, if that place is still face down: a 7 goes in the 7 place. The face-down card that was there comes out and is turned over.
4. Keep going. The card you turned over goes to its own place in the same way, the card under it comes out, and so on.
5. Jacks are wild. A jack can go in any place that is still face down.
6. A card takes its place back from a jack. If you get the real card for a place that holds a jack, in this game it always goes in its place, and the jack moves on to any other face-down place.
7. Your turn ends when you get a card that fits nowhere: a queen or a king, a card whose place already holds that card, or a card for a place you no longer have. Put it face up on the discard pile, and it's the other player's turn.
8. Win the hand. The first player to have every place face up wins the hand, straight away.
9. One place fewer. In the next hand the winner gets one card fewer. After one win you only have the places from ace to 9, and a 10 is no use to you. After two wins it's ace to 8, and so on. The winner of a hand plays first in the next one.
10. Win the game. In a short game, the first player down to 6 places wins: that takes four hand wins. In a full game, play goes on until someone wins a hand with a single place, the ace place, and that player wins the game.

If the deck ever runs out, the discard pile, apart from its top card, is shuffled into a new deck. With two players that almost never happens.

What fits where

Short game or full game?

Short is the default. The first player to win four hands gets down to 6 places and wins. It takes four to seven hands, about six on average: about five minutes.

Full is the whole game: nine hand wins take you from ten places down to one, and then you have to win with that last place. A game takes ten to nineteen hands, about sixteen on average: around ten to fifteen minutes. With only the ace place left, you need one of the four aces or four jacks, and every other card ends your turn.

Controls

• Draw a card: tap the deck in the middle. When the top card of the discard pile fits one of your places, the pile glows too: tap it to take that card instead.
• Put a card in its place: the card you're holding sits in the middle with the deck and the pile, and the place where it goes glows. Tap that place, or the card in your hand.
• A jack: every face-down place glows. Tap the one you want.
• A card that fits nowhere: the pile glows and says Throw away. Tap it, or the card in your hand.
• Keyboard: D draws from the deck and P uses the pile. 1 to 9 and 0 (the 10) put the card you're holding in a place, the arrow keys move between the places a jack can go, and Enter presses whatever has the focus.
• 2 Players: on a phone or tablet held upright, Orange's places are at the bottom and Purple's at the top, turned round so you can sit facing each other. On a wide screen they sit side by side. You take turns, and the glowing places show whose turn it is.

Each face-down card shows its place, A to 10. A jack keeps a yellow tag with the number of the place it fills, and places won in earlier hands show as dashed outlines.

The computer player

Garbage is nearly all luck, so there are no computer levels. The only choice that matters comes at the start of its turn: it takes the top card of the discard pile whenever it fits one of its places, and otherwise draws from the deck. Then it puts every card in its place. With a jack, it picks the face-down place whose own card is least likely to turn up, the number with the most cards already seen.

It only knows what you have seen: the face-up cards and every card thrown on the pile. It never looks at face-down cards, its own or yours, or at the order of the deck, which is shuffled with your browser's secure random numbers.

Tips

• Take a card from the pile when it fits. It's a sure card, where the deck might give you a queen. This is the one choice that really counts: in 200,000 hands played by computer, a player who never took from the pile won only one hand in three against one who always did.
• Watch what your rival throws away. The card that ends their turn is on top of the pile at the start of yours, and a 6 they can't use may be just what your 6 place needs.
• Don't worry where a jack goes. The real card can always take its place back and send the jack on, so a jack is never wasted. In our tests, jacks put anywhere won just as often.
• Fewer places isn't much harder. With six places, every 7, 8, 9 and 10 ends your turn as surely as a queen, but there are fewer places to fill, so a hand comes out about even. Near the end of a full game it even helps: with one place left, any ace or jack wins the hand at once.
• Good for learning numbers. Each face-down place shows its number, from ace to 10, and the right place glows when you hold its card, so young children can match cards to places with help. A short game is a good start.

About Garbage

Pagat, the card game rules site, describes Garbage as an American children's game for two or more players; two players use one deck of 52 cards. The rules here follow Pagat's, and the short game uses the target Pagat gives as its example: the first player down to six places wins.

Families play it in different ways: kings wild instead of jacks, jokers as extra wild cards, every picture card wild, a set number of hands, or one last turn for the other players when someone fills every place. This version is for two players with jacks wild, and a hand ends the moment someone fills every place, as on Pagat. Two rules are our own choices: you can only take the pile's card when it fits one of your places (Pagat says players only take it then anyway, since a card that fits nowhere would just go straight back), and a jack always moves on when its own card turns up (on Pagat it may).

Questions

Updated 13 November 2026