Red Light Green Light 1-2-3 Card Game: Rules for How to Play

Setup

Choose a player to be the dealer. They will shuffle all of the cards.
The dealer then deals seven cards face down to each player. You can look at your own cards, but you shouldn’t show them to the other players.
Place the rest of the cards face down on the table to form a draw pile. The pile should be placed so all of the players can reach it.
The player to the left of the dealer starts the game. Play moves clockwise/left throughout the game.

How to Play Red Light Green Light 1-2-3

On each of your turns you will try to play a cards from your hand to the discard pile.

In Red Light Green Light 1-2-3 players need to play cards in a particular order: red light, green light, 1 card, 2 card, and 3 card. To start the pattern again, a player will have to play a red light card on top of the 3 card.

Order of playing cards — When playing cards during the game, you must play them in the order pictured above. First a red light card has to be played. That is followed by a green light card. Then a one, two and three card are played. To start again a player needs to play a red light card.

To begin each of your turns look at the top card on the discard pile and the cards in your hand. If you have the next card in the sequence, after the card on the top of the discard pile, you can play it to the discard pile. Should you then have the next card in the sequence, you can play that card as well. You can play as many cards as you want to the discard pile as long as they follow the sequence.

Playing cards on a one card — The top card on the discard pile is a one card. The next player begins their turn by playing a two card. They will follow that with a three card, a red light card, and a green light card.

After you are done playing cards, draw the top card from the draw pile and add it to your hand. If you are unable to play any cards, you still draw a card and end your turn. Play then passes to the player on your left.

Winning the Game

The first player to play the last card from their hand wins Red Light Green Light 1-2-3.

Alternative Rules

There are two ways you can tweak the gameplay.

First you can decide to make players keep drawing cards until they draw a card that they can play.

You could also choose to start the game by flipping over the top card from the draw pile. This card starts the discard pile. The first player has to play the next card in the sequence after the card that was flipped over.

Components

21 Red Light Cards
21 Green Light Cards
21 1 Cards
21 2 Cards
21 3 Cards
2 Instruction Cards
Instructions

Year: 2020 | Publisher: Endless Games

Genres: Card, Children’s

Ages: 5+ | Number of Players: 2+ | Length of Game: 10-15 minutes

Difficulty: Light | Strategy: Light | Luck: High

For more board and card game rules/how to plays, check out our complete alphabetical list of card and board game rules posts.

Written By:

Eric Mortensen

Eric Mortensen is an owner and head writer on Geeky Hobbies since 2014. He is an avid board game player and collector with over 3,000 board and card games in his collection. Since 2014 he has written more than 1,100 board game how to play guides.