Flip 7 is a push-your-luck card game that plays out one short round at a time. The deck is mostly numbers, from zero to twelve, and each number appears exactly as many times as it is worth: twelve twelves, eleven elevens, and so on down to a single one and a single zero. Alongside them sit a few cards that change your score and a few that change your options. The winner is the first player to reach two hundred points across as many rounds as it takes, and every round comes down to one question — how much further do you want to push?
Drawing and busting
On your turn you ask for a card and turn it face up in front of you, where the whole table can see it. As long as every number you receive is different, your pile keeps growing. Draw a number you already have and you bust: your cards go to the discard pile and the round is worth nothing to you. That is the trap the deck is built around, because the numbers worth the most are also the most common. A twelve looks wonderful on the table and instantly becomes the single value most likely to knock you out.
Staying or pushing on
Before any new card you may choose to stay. Staying banks what is in front of you and takes you out of the round: you can no longer bust, but you can no longer improve either. The round ends once every player has stayed or busted, and each surviving player adds up the numbers they collected. Because everything is face up, the decision is as much about the table as about the odds — if a rival is a round away from winning it is worth one more card, and if you are comfortably ahead it rarely is. A handful of action cards take the choice out of your hands: one freezes a player where they are and banks their score, one forces three draws in a row, and one lets a player throw away a duplicate instead of busting, but only once.
Bonus and multiplier cards
Some cards modify the score instead of adding to the sequence. Five of them are worth two, four, six, eight and ten points and are added to the round total. One more doubles: it multiplies the sum of your number cards by two, but not the bonus cards, which are added afterwards. That order is what people most often get wrong in their heads — total the numbers, apply the doubling, then add the flat bonuses. Busting throws away modifiers too, so holding a ten-point card is not a reason to keep drawing forever.
The seven-card bonus
The big score is collecting seven different numbers in a single round. A player who manages it takes fifteen points on top of the value of the cards, and the round stops there and then for everyone else, who bank whatever they were holding. It is the swing that decides most games: seven distinct numbers are usually worth well over fifty on their own, and the bonus lands on top of that.
Reaching two hundred points
Rounds continue until someone crosses two hundred points. The round in progress is always finished so that everyone has had the same number of turns, and if more than one player is past the target the highest total wins. Two or three players get through a game in about twenty minutes; with a full table it takes longer, because seven-card bonuses keep cutting rounds short.
Keeping score with Score Buddy
For Flip 7 the Score Buddy scorer is a grid of card values rather than a plain number pad: tap the values from zero to twelve that a player has in front of them and the total builds itself. There is a ×2 button for the doubling card and five bonus buttons for +2, +4, +6, +8 and +10. Select seven different values and the fifteen-point bonus appears on its own and is already folded into the total, so you cannot forget it. The working sum stays visible under the player name — something like (7+12+9)×2 +10 — and the confirm button shows the round score before you commit it. The target is set to two hundred. A player who busts never touches the grid: the Fold button on their card closes the round for zero. Cards that have already played dim to a done badge, the line above the list names whoever is still owed, and the turn moves on by itself once everybody has played. Under each total the card counts down what is left of the two hundred.