Pair It — The Pirate Game
Single Player vs. Computer • art from the real printed deck
Round 1 · First to 300 wins
How I interpreted the rulebook (worth a skim before you play)
- Deck composition (98 cards): the manual lists card types but not exact counts, so most of these are still my placeholder guess: 64 regular cards (one of every Color × Number × Picture combo — confirmed against the real card scan), 4 Gold Treasure, 4 Pirates, 4 Shipwreck, 4 All Hands On Deck, 4 Fire the Cannon, 4 Draw 3, and 4 Anchor. Reverse (6 total) is confirmed to the real counts you gave me: 1 per color (Red/Blue/Green/Yellow) plus 2 Wild Reverse. Tell me the real numbers for the rest and I'll match those too.
- Wild Reverse: rainbow-bordered, so it's freely playable like Gold Treasure and All Hands On Deck — and just like Gold Treasure, the extra turn it grants can be followed by ANY card, no restriction. It also combos with the Anchor card regardless of the active color.
- Matching a regular card: you need TWO matching attributes with the active card — color + number, number + picture, or picture + color. Matching just one attribute alone isn't enough.
- When action cards can be played: only rainbow-bordered cards are wild — that's just Gold Treasure and All Hands On Deck, which are freely playable on any turn. Pirates, Shipwreck, Fire the Cannon, and Draw 3 print with a solid colored border (not rainbow) in the real deck, so — like Reverse — they must match the current active color border to be played.
- After a colored-border action card is played: Pirates, Shipwreck, Fire the Cannon, Draw 3, and Reverse don't carry a number or picture — just a color. So once one is on top of the discard pile, the very next card only needs to match that color (e.g. a green Fire the Cannon means any green card is playable next, regular or action) rather than needing to also match some older number/picture requirement.
- Pirates: read literally — "next player loses their turn and must steal one card from the hand of the player who dealt the card" — so the skipped player steals from whoever played Pirates (a small consolation for losing the turn), not the reverse.
- 2-player Reverse: with only one opponent, "reversing direction" has no real effect on turn order, so I implement it as an extra turn for whoever plays it (a common house rule for 2-player Uno-style games).
- Gold Treasure: a free play that grants whoever played it one bonus play right away (same player goes again) — and since it's rainbow/wild, that bonus play is wide open: any card can be played, no color/number/picture restriction.
- Fire the Cannon: give a card to another player, then the next play must match Fire the Cannon's own border color — same color-only reset as Pirates/Shipwreck/Draw 3.
- All Hands On Deck / Anchor+Reverse combo: whoever PLAYED the card (or completed the combo) gets to lock in ONE attribute (color, number, or picture) — only that attribute must match on the very next play. This applies whether you or the computer played it.
- Anchor: an Anchor is never legal alone — you need a Reverse card to "find a Reverse card to play this card." But that one Reverse unlocks ALL the Anchors currently in your hand at once, not just one — play as many Anchors as you're holding in a single move.
- All Hands On Deck "slap": simulated as a timed reaction check against the computer, since there's no physical table to slap.
- "PAIR IT!" call and scoring-to-300: your latest rulebook text didn't include these, but you weren't sure yet if they're still part of the game — I've left them in for now. Tell me to remove them and I will.
- Real card art: every icon, border color, and card layout is cropped directly from the actual printed "Pair It" deck (the "Pair It Cards July 2026" proof folder — 109 scanned card faces). Card interiors, corner numbers, borders, and rule-card icons/wording now match the physical cards.
- Color for Pirates! / Shipwreck! / Fire the Cannon! / Draw 3: the physical deck prints these in all four border colors (with a matching colored parrot for Pirates!). The digital deck's data model didn't originally track a color for those kinds, so each of the 4 copies is assigned one of the four colors (by card ID, one per color) — and since only rainbow cards are wild, that color is what must match the active color for the card to be playable, exactly like Reverse.
- Not yet added — "Wild Cannon!": the real deck also includes a distinct "Wild Cannon!" card (black border: "Pass two cards to any player"; rainbow border: "Pass a card to any player") that isn't in the current 98-card build. Say the word if you'd like it added as a new action-card kind.