Overview

In Up or Down? players aim to be the first to arrange their cards in numerical order from lowest to highest.

You have three racks, and they can go in either ascending or descending order.

Each turn you will be playing a card from your hand into the display, then taking a card from either side of your placement, then draw from the main deck (either the face up card, or the deck itself face-down)

Setup

Each player gets a hand of three cards. The remaining are placed in two piles: one face up and one face down. Six cards are placed face up around the decks--this is called the display.

Gameplay

On your turn, do the following actions in order:

1. Place a card from your hand into the display (the cards around the deck). The card must be placed in numerical sequence.
2. Take a card from the display adjacent to the card you just put down.
3. Place that card on one of your columns.
4. Draw a new card from either the face-up pile or the face-down pile and add it to your hand.

When you place a second card on a column, that determines whether the column will be ascending or descending. You want the first card of each column to be at one of the two extremes.

If you cannot or do not want to place a card in a column, you can discard an entire column and begin a new one. Each card in your discard pile will score you 1 point at the end of the game.

Turns continue until all players no longer have any cards in their hands (even after both the face-up and face-down piles are depleted).

Scoring

The score of each column is the number of cards of the most frequent color times the number of cards in the column. The score of each column added together plus the number of cards in your discard pile is your total score.