Glossary
Every term used across this site, defined plainly and in one place. Terms marked “this game” describe something specific to Four Colors; the rest are general card-game vocabulary you will meet anywhere in this family.
A – C
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Action card | Any card that does something beyond matching — Skip, Reverse, Draw Two, Skip Everyone, Discard All, Flip. Wilds are usually counted separately. |
| Active colour | The colour play must currently match. Normally the colour of the top discard, but after a wild it is whatever colour that player named. |
| Call | The declaration you must make on reaching one card. Forgetting it lets an opponent catch you for a two-card penalty. |
| Catch | Calling out an opponent who reached one card without declaring it. Successful catches force them to draw two. |
| Chain | Two or more consecutive turns taken by the same player, created by cards that skip everyone else. The core of two-player tactics. |
| Crazy Eights | The American ancestor of this game, played with a standard deck where any 8 is wild. See the history page. |
D – H
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Dark side (this game) | The harsher face of the Flip deck, carrying Skip Everyone, Draw Five and Wild Draw Color. Worth about 19% more in points than the light side. |
| Discard All (this game) | A card that plays itself plus every other card of its colour from your hand at once. Worth 40 points. No traditional equivalent. |
| Discard pile | The face-up pile you play onto. Only the top card matters for matching. Reshuffled into a new draw pile when the draw pile runs out. |
| Draw pile | The face-down stock you draw from. Also called the stock or the deck. |
| Draw until you match | A house rule where a player who cannot play keeps drawing until they can. Not used here — in this game you draw exactly one. |
| Elimination (this game) | Being knocked out of a No Mercy round for reaching 25 cards. Your hand is still counted for the winner's score. |
| Flip card (this game) | Turns every hand and both piles to the deck's other side simultaneously. |
| Going out | Playing your last card and so winning the round. |
| Hand | The cards you hold. Also sometimes used to mean a single round. |
| House rule | Any rule a group adds or changes by agreement. This family of games has an unusually strong house-rule tradition — see house rules. |
J – R
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Jump-in | A house rule allowing a player holding an identical card to the one just played to play it immediately, out of turn. Not implemented here. |
| Liability | The total point value of your hand — what an opponent scores if they go out now. The number that matters more than card count. |
| Light side (this game) | The gentler face of the Flip deck, where the worst penalty is a Wild Draw Two. Play always starts here. |
| Mau-Mau | The German ancestor of this game, played with a standard deck. Already contains draw, skip, reverse and wild effects. See history. |
| Mercy Rule (this game) | The No Mercy rule that eliminates any player reaching 25 cards. |
| Pending draw | A penalty that has been played but not yet taken, because the target may still be able to answer it by stacking. |
| Progressive draw | A loose stacking house rule where any draw card can answer any other. This game uses the tighter like-for-like rule instead. |
| Rank | A card's number or symbol, independent of colour. Matching by rank is what lets you change colour. |
| Reshuffle | When the draw pile empties, the discard pile except its top card is shuffled to form a new draw pile. |
| Round | One deal, played until somebody goes out. A match is a series of rounds played to a target score. |
S – Z
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Seven-O | A house rule where a 7 swaps your hand with a chosen player and a 0 passes all hands around. Not implemented here. |
| Shedding game | The category this game belongs to: games won by getting rid of every card in your hand. Contrast with trick-taking and rummy games. |
| Singleton | Your only card in a given colour. Often a liability, because playing it leaves you void in that colour. |
| Stacking | Answering a draw card with the same draw card to pass an accumulating penalty along. Optional in Standard and Flip; always on in No Mercy. |
| Stock | Another name for the draw pile. |
| Target score | The cumulative total that wins the match — 250 or 500 in this game. See scoring. |
| Tempo | Progress towards going out, measured in turns. Drawing costs tempo; a Skip gains it. |
| Void | Holding no cards of a given colour. Being void in the active colour with no wild forces you to draw. |
| Wild | A colourless card playable on anything, letting you name the active colour. Worth 50 points. |
| Wild Draw Color (this game) | Flip dark-side card: name a colour and the next player draws until they draw it. Cannot be stacked. Expected draw about four cards. |
| Wild Draw Five / Ten (this game) | This game's large wild penalties, replacing the traditional Wild Draw Four. Worth 50 and 60 points respectively. |
A note on terminology
Because this family of games has been reinvented independently in a dozen countries, the vocabulary is genuinely inconsistent — what one group calls stacking another calls chaining, and "progressive" means different things in different rule books. Where a term is ambiguous, this site uses the definition above and says so explicitly on the page in question. If you find a place where we have been unclear, tell us and we will fix it.