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Everyone builds a face-down row of 5 cards and tries to make the highest-scoring trick layout out of it, like poker, only the suits are tricks. The game runs in four phases: you pick an anchor card and place it face down, you are dealt four more sight unseen, and then you take turns drawing, swapping and sabotaging your rivals until someone calls “Drop in” and ends the round.

Eight, five copies of each, ordered by real-world difficulty: ollie (1), boardslide (2), 50-50 grind (3), kickflip (4), heelflip (5), 360 flip (6), 540 McTwist (7) and 900 (8). A card is worth its place on that ladder.

You add up the values of your five tricks and add the layout bonus: pair +5, small straight (three cards in a row) +10, three of a kind +15, full house +30, four of a kind +40, big straight (five cards in a row) +50. Whoever scores highest in a round takes the whole pot for that round.

No. The physical arrangement on the table is irrelevant. A straight can sit there as 4, 2, 5, 1, 3 and it is still a straight. Only the card values count: at the reveal you simply group them into layouts and add up the points.

No. The slots are locked. You may not move a card from the edge into the middle. When you swap a card during play, the new one goes into exactly the slot you took the old one from.

No, never, not even the first one you picked yourself. From the moment a card lands face down on the table, you only know it from memory.

It depends what you do with it. If it completes a layout, it takes the value of the missing card and counts as that specific trick, but then you do not get its base 15 points. If it forms no layout at all, it counts as a standalone card worth 15 points.

It kills the flow. It cancels the bonuses of the tricks next to it and breaks a straight, and the cards lying immediately to its left and right are worth 0 points. If Wipeout ends up at the edge of the row (slot 1 or 5), it zeroes only one card.

Zero. An unfired Spy Drone or Swap revealed in your row is simply an empty slot worth 0 points. The exceptions are The G.O.A.T. and Wipeout, which have rules of their own.

You get outbid: your cards score nothing at all for that round, and you take −10 points. Your rivals keep everything they earned. That is why the moment you call “Drop in” matters more than the cards themselves.

You shuffle the discard pile and it becomes the new deck. Play continues without a break.

The player whose final round held the higher-value layout. If you both crossed the points threshold in the same round, the quality of that closing combo decides it, not the total.

All eight are real tricks, in the real order of difficulty, from the ollie everyone learns first to the 900, two and a half rotations in the air. A higher-value card is a trick you learn later.

The ollie. Without it you cannot land any airborne trick, because every other one is a variation of it. Then boardslide and 50-50 grind, and only after that the kickflip. The cards in the game are ordered exactly that way.

The direction the board spins and what you flick it with. A kickflip is flicked with your toes and the board rolls towards your heels; a heelflip is flicked with your heel and the board spins the other way. In the game a kickflip is worth 4 points and a heelflip 5, because it forgives fewer mistakes.

Two and a half rotations in the air above a ramp, or 900 degrees. A legendary trick, which is why it is the highest card in the deck.

2 to 4 players. With two it is faster and nastier, with four there is more going on and it is harder to guess what your rivals will do.

Ages 7 and up. The rules take five minutes to explain, and every player gets their own aid card with the scoring cheat sheet, so nobody has to memorise anything.

As long as you decide before the deal. A quick session to 150 points runs 15–20 minutes, Classic to 200 about 30 minutes, Pro Tournament to 300 about 45 minutes. A single round takes a few minutes, so you can stop the game at any point.

No. The trick names are real, but the game is about memory and card layouts, not board skills. It is played by kids who have skated for years and by kids who have never owned a board. After one game both know eight trick names.

Yes, and for a concrete reason: the tricks on the cards are real, ordered from the easiest (ollie) to the hardest (900), so a kid picks up the names and the hierarchy they will later see at the skatepark. The box fits in a backpack and a game lasts a quarter of an hour, so it works for a rainy day, for camp and for a trip.

They will. The Pro Tournament mode to 300 points runs 45 minutes and is a game of bluff, memory and steady nerves. If you remember Tony Hawk landing the first 900 in 1999, the highest card in the deck is for you.

58 cards: 40 trick cards, 4 Swaps, 4 Wipeouts, 4 Spy Drones, 2 G.O.A.T.s and 4 aid cards with the scoring cheat sheet, one per player. Plus an illustrated rulebook.

SK8 COMBO exists in two separate language versions, Polish and English. One box holds one version, and you pick it when you order.

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