1The aim

Little Ricky is a card-shedding game about judging risk. Each round, try to play every card in your hand. If you get stuck, decide whether to draw another card and keep going, or quit the round and accept the penalty points for what you still hold.

Penalty points are bad. They stay with you from round to round. The game ends after a round in which anyone reaches 40 or more points, and the player with the fewest points wins.

2The deck and setup

The deck has 56 cards: eight each of the numbers 1 to 6, plus eight Little Ricky cards.

At the start of each round the game shuffles the full deck, deals 6 cards to every player, places the rest face down as the draw pile and turns the top card face up to start the discard pile.

You take the first turn of the game. In later rounds, the last player to have played a card in the previous round starts. Play then passes around the table in seat order.

3The card sequence

You may play a card that is the same value as the top card of the discard pile, or the next value in this loop:

A Little Ricky card can only go on a 6 or on another Little Ricky. It cannot be played on a 5.

4Your turn: choose one action

On every turn you must do exactly one of these three things. You cannot combine them.

• You may quit even when you could play. Quitting is a tactical choice.
• When the draw pile runs out it is not reshuffled. Nobody can draw for the rest of that round.
• If you have no legal card and cannot draw, quitting is your only option.

5Controls

• Play a card: drag it from your hand and drop it on the discard pile. The pile glows blue while you drag and gold when you are over it.
• If highlighting is switched on, cards you can legally play lift up with a gold outline when it is your turn.
• If you drop a card that cannot be played, it returns to your hand and a message explains which values are allowed.
• Draw: press Draw a card or click the draw pile.
• Quit: press Quit round.
• Keyboard and accessibility: you can also double-click a card, or select it with Tab and press Enter, to play it. Press D to draw and Q to quit.
• The player whose turn it is has a gold glow and a Turn label. Opponents take their turns automatically, following exactly the same rules.

6How a round ends

A round ends immediately when a player plays their last card, or when every player has quit.

If everyone except one player has quit, that player keeps taking turns but may no longer draw. They carry on playing until their hand is empty or they cannot make a legal play, and then the round ends.

7Scoring a round

Everyone looks at the cards they did not get rid of. Each different value counts only once: numbers score their face value, and any number of Little Ricky cards score 10 in total. Duplicates add nothing.

Penalty points are shown as markers beside each score: a black marker is worth 10 and a white marker is worth 1.

Reward for emptying your hand: if you play your final card, you score nothing that round and may hand back one marker you already own. The game automatically returns a black 10-point marker if you have one, otherwise a white 1-point marker.

8Winning

After each round is scored, the game checks every total. If anyone has 40 or more points, the game ends and the player with the lowest total wins. Players tied for the lowest total share the victory.

9Tactics

• Learn the loop first: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Little Ricky, then 1 again.
• Drawing uses your whole turn, so think before you draw.
• Quitting early can make sense when your hand holds only a few different values, because duplicates are free.
• A hand of many different high values gets expensive fast. Every draw is a gamble.
• Emptying your hand is most valuable once you hold a black 10-point marker.
• Watch the scores along the top. Whoever is close to 40 can end the game.