Garbage (Trash)
Garbage, also called Trash, is a simple sequence-making card game. Complete your layout from Ace through 10 before your opponent, then win progressively shorter rounds. No-one knows its origin for sure, but most of us have played it since our childhood.
Overview
Garbage — also known as Trash — is a fast, luck-and-tactics card race for two players, played with a standard deck. Each of you has a row of ten face-down cards representing slots Ace through Ten, and you flip and slot cards until your whole row is face up in order. It is easy to learn, and grows tenser each round as the winning row gets shorter.
Win a round and your next sequence becomes shorter: Ace–9, Ace–8, and eventually a single Ace for the match.
Play Classic or Wild Card mode against the computer, or Classic online against another player.
How to play
- Draw from the stock, or take the discard when it fits immediately.
- Place Ace in slot 1, Two in slot 2, through Ten in slot 10.
- Turn over the displaced card and continue while it fits an open slot.
- Discard an unusable card to end your turn.
- Fill every required slot before your opponent.
Classic and Wild Card modes
Classic: no Wild cards or Jokers. Jacks, Queens, and Kings cannot fill numbered positions.
Wild Card: Kings may fill any open position.
Rules and winning
- Take the discard only when it can be placed immediately.
- Completing a sequence ends the round without an extra turn.
- The winner needs one fewer card next round.
- Complete the final one-card Ace round to win.
Shorter rounds are not easier
Winning a round takes a card off your next row, which sounds like a clear advantage. It isn’t.
In the opening ten-card round you need Ace through Ten, so in Classic 40 of the 52 cards can be placed somewhere — only the Jacks, Queens and Kings are dead. Win your way down to a two-card row and you need an Ace and a Two and nothing else, so just 8 cards in the deck are any use to you. Everything from a Three upwards is waste.
So the player who is ahead draws dead card after dead card, while the player who is behind still has most of the deck to work with. This is where the game balances itself: neither side holds a lasting advantage, and the lead can change in a flash.
Tips and strategy
- Remember which useful ranks have appeared.
- Take a discard when it starts a placement chain.
- If the stock runs out, the discard pile is shuffled back in, so no rank is ever gone for good. A slot you cannot fill now will come round again.
- In Wild Card, a King can go into any face-down slot, not just the highlighted one. Spend it on the rank you have already seen most of.
Online multiplayer
Choose Play Online to challenge live players using either the Android app or the browser. Online matches use Classic rules; Classic and Wild Card modes against the computer remain available.
We also have a shorter seven-card version called Seven Up, played against the computer.