Flip7 is a push-your-luck card game: keep flipping cards to build your score, stop while you're ahead, and bust the moment you draw a number you already hold. The whole game is one question asked over and over - one more card, or bank what you have?
The deck is built so that greed is mathematically punished. Number cards run from 0 to 12, and each number appears as many times as its value - one 1, five 5s, twelve 12s, plus a single 0. The high cards you want most are exactly the ones most likely to pair up and bust you.
Alongside the numbers there are two other kinds of cards:
| Card | Count | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Freeze | 3 | Played on any active player - their round ends on the spot. |
| Flip Three | 3 | Played on any active player - they must flip three cards in a row, ready or not. |
| Second Chance | 3 | Shields you once: the first duplicate you draw is forgiven instead of busting you. |
| x2 | 1 | Doubles the sum of your number cards this round. |
| +2 +4 +6 +8 +10 | 1 each | Added to your score after everything else. |
On your turn you make one choice:
Draw a number you already hold and you bust: your round is over and it's worth zero, unless a Second Chance saves you. Collect seven different number cards and you hit a flip7 - the round ends immediately for everyone, and you take a +15 bonus on top of your total.
The round also ends when no player is left active - everyone has stopped, busted, or been frozen. Scores are banked, the table resets, and a new round begins - dealt from the same deck. Cards spent in earlier rounds stay spent until the deck runs out, so like counting cards in blackjack, remembering what's already gone tells you what can still bust you. Say you hold a 7: seven copies exist, and every one you've seen pass through earlier rounds is one that can no longer pair with yours. Hold a 7 with five already gone and hitting is far safer than the same hand in round one.
First player to reach 200 total points wins the game.
At the end of a round, a surviving hand is worth: the sum of its number cards, doubled if you hold the x2, plus any bonus cards, plus 15 if you reached seven numbers.
What a frozen player scores is the one rule tables argue about, so this site plays it both ways:
The live game runs at tables of 4, 8 or 18 players, and empty seats are filled by three bot personalities: Tactician plays it safe and stops at three number cards, Gambler chases all seven, Wildcard flips a coin on every decision. The same bots also play millions of games against each other on a Kubernetes cluster, where you can watch which strategy actually wins - and stress the infrastructure while you're at it.