Literal Wild Card

Wherein a joker substitutes for the 6 of hearts.

For a character with unpredictable allegiance, see Wild Card.

In many Tabletop Games, players will have their options limited by the supplies they have on hand, meaning if you don't have the last piece required to make a play, you'll have to make do without. However, some games have alternatives that can be subbed in for the missing piece. For example, if a player held two red cards, two green cards, and a wild card, they could use their wild to make a three-of-a-kind in either color without having to wait. Or if you need five stones to build something and only have four, you can spend them and a wildcard resource to build it without having to wait for your fifth stone.

Mathematically speaking, having wilds will generally open up the game, as having them will increase the number of possible combinations that allow any given value to appear. For instance, the probability of drawing two consecutive aces without replacement is 1-in-221, or about 0.45%. However, if two wilds are added to the standard deck, the odds increase to 5-in-477, about 1.05%. Similar arguments apply for wildcard resources — they make it less likely that someone will get stuck because they don't have the right resources, and they make resource-intensive game pieces more manageable to use. That being said, don't expect this difference to lessen the frustration when the same player keeps getting lucky.

Aside from opening the game up, if wilds need not be used right away, they can also create interesting dilemmas. Because wilds are inherently valuable, a player who has one will often be left pondering whether they should use it right away, or hold out for what they're looking for, allowing the wild to be saved for later. This risk-reward tradeoff adds some strategy to games which, by nature, have an element of chance. Additionally, some wilds have drawbacks like low point values, which can raise the question of whether you should use them at all.

While primarily a tabletop game trope, examples do appear in other media involving player decisions. This mechanic is especially common in card games, where even the best players can lose out due to sheer bad luck. If a game features playing cards and uses jokers, expect them to fill this role. Conversely, a piece need not be a literal card to fill the same function, so long as the primary purpose is to be substituted for a player's chosen value.

Also see Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic.

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Examples:

Board Games

• 7 Wonders:
  • Both the original game and 7 Wonders Duel have resource symbols that can be used as any raw resource, and symbols that can be used as any refined resource. 7 Wonders also has brown cards that can provide one of two resources per turn.
  • The Scientists Guild and both sides of the Babylon wonder feature a symbol that can count as any one of the three scientific symbols at the end of the game. This means that you're free to choose whichever gives you the most points, which varies depending on which symbols you already have.
  • In 7 Wonders Architects, coins are a wild resource that can substitute for any missing Resource needed to construct a stage of your wonder. Since constructing a wonder stage is mandatory if you have the resources for it, you can't really hoard coins.
• Abyss: The Kraken expansion brings in Kraken Allies, which can count as any of the five original races (squids, shellfish, crabs, seahorses and jellyfish) when you're paying for a Lord. However, they have the downside that spending them gives you Nebulis, which means you'll lose points at the end of the game unless you can pay them to the Treasury or saddle an opponent with them.^{More Information} Kraken Allies can never be affiliated; this can be a blessing or a curse depending on what you're doing. Hoarding Kraken Allies is risky — if you still have any at the end of the game, you have to take their Nebulis penalty for no benefit, and with no way to get rid of them before the scores are tallied.
• Century: Spice Road gives every player a card to upgrade any cube in their inventory twice, or two of them once. While other cards may convert for more value, this card stands out for its sheer flexibility.
• Chess: A promoted pawn can be turned into any non-king piece. 99% of the time you'll make a queen — the strongest option — but you do have the option to go for a weaker piece in the niche situations where it's useful.^When? Occasionally, a knight's move will be necessary on a congested board, or a rook or bishop will be summoned to prevent stalemate. Alternately, a player confident in their position may do it to show off.
• Elder Sign: Some powerful buff effects add a red die to the dice pool; it has better results overall, plus a wildcard face that can substitute for any other symbol on the dice. This is invaluable for quests that require a difficult combination of die results to be rolled.
• Everdell:
  • Constructions are associated with a Critter — if you have the Construction, you can play the Critter for free once. The Ever Tree uniquely lets you play any Critter for free.
  • The Judge's ability lets you substitute one of any resource for any other resource whenever you play a Critter or Construction. For instance, you may pay a 2-berry cost with a twig and a berry instead. This amounts to letting you treat any one resource of your choice as a wild whenever you pay a card's cost.
  • The Peddler lets you exchange up to two resources for the same number of other resources.
• Flamecraft: Potion Dragons are a partial example — while they only create potions as a good, their ability is to swap them with another dragon at another shop, then activate the swapped dragon’s ability. Additionally, gold coins can be exchanged for any trade good during the game, but are worth reputation at the end of the game.
• LEGO Games: Skeletons in Monster 4 act as wild cards, taking the place of one of the monsters you would otherwise place.
• Lost Ruins of Arnak: Any travel icon can be paid for using a higher travel icon. This means that the plane, the highest icon, can pay for any travel symbol.
• Parks: Wildlife tokens can be spent to substitute for any token when paying a cost (except when filling a canteen). As the manual points out, they're wild.
• Res Arcana:
  • The game effectively lets your cards function as a kind of wilds. Any card can be discarded for a Gold or any two non-Gold resources.
  • Many components have effects that can generate any type of normal essence, or at least offer some choice (e.g. letting you choose between getting one Elan and one Death).
  • Perlae Imperii introduces Pearls, which can be converted into a Gold or any two normal essences as a free action.
• Risk: Each of the territory cards has a symbol of either a soldier, a cannon or a horseman. Any three cards with the same symbol or one of each symbol can be traded in for more armies. There are also two wild cards which have all three symbols on them, allowing them to act as any of the three symbols. A wild card can be combined with any two other territory cards and turned in for armies, thus replacing one of the needed cards.
• Scrabble: In addition to tiles featuring letters, there are two blank tiles per game. These tiles have no point value, but may be substituted for any letter.
• Shadows over Camelot: Most Fight cards have a strength score from 1 to 5. A couple are wild cards that can be any number in that range, making them especially useful for Sidequests that require Fight cards to be played in a specific order or combination.
• Sidereal Confluence: The Unity faction treats all resources as wild for their economic converters and produces wild resources that can fill any need, all as long as it matches the correct size. Basically, they import quantity and export quality.
• Splendor:
  • Each development card has a cost in gems (diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and/or onyx), each of which has a limited quantity in circulation. Players also have a more limited ability to get gold tokens, which can substitute for any of them.
  • Gold plays a similar role in the 2-player version Splendor Duel, where it's particularly useful to pay costs involving the new, scarce Pearl resource.
  • "The Orient", a module of Splendor Cities, introduces a type of wild cards that can be put into any pile of a color you already have. From then on, it'll count as a card of that color for the purpose of cost reductions. This mechanic made it into Splendor Duel, where these wild cards also count towards the and the "10 or more Prestige points on cards of the same color" win condition.
• Ticket to Ride: All variants of Ticket to Ride require matching cards equal to the length of the railroad be played in order to build on that stretch — with some routes requiring one color in particular. However, locomotives, which are gold on a rainbow background, may be substituted for any other color. However, if a player claims a face-up locomotive on their turn, they may only take one card, instead of the typical two.
• Trails: Players who land on the space occupied by wildlife (the bear) roll the die to determine where it moves, then performs that space's action. If the die lands wildlife-side up, the player may move the bear to any legal space and perform the associated action.
• In Trivial Pursuit, trivia questions come in six categories (Geography, History, Entertainment, Literature, Science & Nature, and Sports & Leisure). Most spaces on the board are labeled with one of these categories, and what space you land on determines the sort of question you'll get. The exception is the center space, which lets the player choose which category their question will come from ... unless answering the question would win them the game, in which case it's their opponents who choose the category for them.
• Wingspan:
  • When you play a bird, you can spend any two food as though it were one wildcard. For instance, if a bird costs one fish, you can play it for two grains instead.
  • Several bird powers can take any food from the supply.
  • Star nests count as all four nest types for the purpose of bonus cards, end-of-round goals and bird powers that care about nest types.
  • The Oceania Expansion introduces the "*" wingspan for flightless birds. These always satisfy wingspan requirements like "less than 30 cm", and can be treated as any value for the bonus cards that ask for wingspans in ascending or descending order.
  • The Oceania Expansion adds Nectar, which can count as any food type when paying a bird's food cost. There are also some endgame bonuses that revolve around who spend the most Nectar. However, it has the downside that any unspent Nectar goes away at the end of each round.

Card Games

• Cards Against Humanity: In a game about finding the funniest combination of cards, blank cards may be filled in by whatever the player sees fit.
• Crazy Eights: Players must play a card on the discard pile which has the same rank or suit as the card on the top of the pile. They can play a card with the rank of eight instead, which allows them to decide the suit of the top card for the next player's turn.
• The quasi-official rules for Cripple Mr Onion, the Discworld card game, have an "eights wild" variant, and a "null eights" variant, where they can increase the number of cards in an Onion without affecting the value. If eights are wild, three eights are a Wild Royal and eight eights^note Discworld cards have eight suits; on Roundworld it can be played with a Fatpack deck or two decks with different suits shuffled together are a Lesser Onion that beats any other Lesser Onion and can only be crippled as a Great Onion. You can't Cripple Mr Onion if your nine card run contains fewer wild eights than the Onion you're crippling.
• Imploding Kittens, the first expansion pack of Exploding Kittens, has four Feral Cat cards, which can act as any of the five types of normal Cat cards, to increase the chance of getting Doubles (to steal a card from an opponent), Triples (to ask for a specific card type from them), or Five Different Cards (to take any card from the discard pile).
• Hanabi: Inverted with the multicolor firework available as one of the provided variants. Said variant makes them a wild card, but this actually makes the game harder because they count as wilds only for identifying the card's color for the card holder when they still need to be built as a separate pile rather than going into the other suits.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Basic lands only produce one color of mana. However, there are also lands that can produce all five colors, or another subset of them. These come with drawbacks such as entering the battlefield tapped (which means you can't use them the turn you play them) or damaging you when you use them.^note The sole exception is the "original duals" from early in the game's history. Certain creatures and artifacts can also make mana of any color.
  • Several cards have effects that go something like "you may spend this mana as though it were mana of any color", which turns that mana into a wildcard.
  • For casting costs, a grey circle with a number inside indicates the "any mana" component of a spell. A spell could, for example, require 2 red mana, and 3 more mana of any color, for a total of 5 mana. The inverse of that is colorless mana, which can be used for "any mana" components, but unless specifically noted, cannot be used for specific requirements. So while, for example, a red mana can be used for an "any mana" component, colorless mana cannot be used in place of a red mana component.
• In Phase 10, the Wild card can represent any color and number, allowing substitutions in sets and runs. Once a player has decided what the Wild card represents and puts the card down, it can't be changed.
• Poker: In some variants, the dealer decides at the beginning of the game which cards, if any, are wild.
• President: In some variations^note usually when playing with 3 or 6 players, so the deck is divided evenly, the jokers are added to the standard 52-card deck and can either be played as the high card or complete a two, three, or four-of-a-kind.
• Uno: The classic version (pre-2018) has two types of Wild cards, which allow you to declare the next color to match. The regular Wild can be played on any turn, while the Wild Draw Four forces the next player in line to take four cards and lose a turn. However, you can only use a Wild Draw Four if you don't have any cards of the current color, and the next player can challenge you on this; if it turns out you were bluffing, you take the four cards instead. Post-2018 decks and specialized versions add their own types of Wild cards and rules for playing them.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Normally, Fusion Summoning requires a set of materials as stated on the target card in order to complete the summoning. There exist however some cards that are able to acts as substitutes for any specifically-named fusion material, provided the other material is correct. "King of the Swamp" is the most well-known of these due to having an additional effect of discarding itself to search for the fusion spell "Polymerization", making it an objectivally superior choice to all the classic fusion substitutes (newer fusion substitutes might be more useful in their appropiate archetypes however).

Dice Games

• Versions of Liars Dice allow any rolled 1s to count as any other number at the same time (with some exceptions), thus calling 5 dice rolling 6 will allow 2 dice rolling 1 and 3 dice rolling 6. In some of these versions, bidding a number of 1 causes the value to be doubled for purposes of determining if a bid is larger (e.g. 3 rolled 6 < 2 rolled 1 < 4 rolled 2).
• Settlers Of Catan Dice Game: Unlike the other five resources, gold is not useful in and of itself. However, players may trade two gold for one of any other resource, providing more flexibility in development decisions.

Tabletop RPGs

• In Wulin, it is better to roll exactly the target score than to roll above it; to facilitate this, any d8 that rolls 8 is wild.

Live-Action TV — Game and Reality Shows

• In the TV game show Concentration, contestants had to match the prizes the squares to (1) add that prize to their bank, and (2) reveal more of the rebus puzzle for them to solve (which won the game and allowed them to keep all their banked prizes). But there were two Wild Cards among the 30 squares, and they would automatically match whatever was behind the other selected square. Plus, on the NBC version, a contestant who called both Wild Cards in the same turn would win $500 (later a car) — regardless of who won that game!
  • The NBC revival Classic Concentration had three Wild Cards on the board for each game. A contestant was credited a $500 bonus on his/her prize rack for finding two of them in a row, and another $500 for finding the third one immediately afterward. They had to solve the puzzle to win the bonus.
• On The Joker's Wild, as the title implies, when one or two jokers appear on the board, the contestant may either match the joker(s) with one displayed category or go "off the board" for a question in a category not displayed. If three jokers appear, the contestant can win the game by correctly answering one question in any category.
• The Card Game on The Price Is Right used a deck of playing cards to make bids on a car. Numbered cards multiplied the value of it by $100, face cards multiply 10 by $100, while aces were wild. A contestant could make the next bid anything he/she wants or just give a final estimate on the car.
• Late in the run of the CBS edition of Card Sharks, in the Money Cards round, a contestant could uncover up to three Wild Cards which were used to select which of seven face-down cards had the word "Car" on it to win said car.
• Pay Cards! and its later reboot Super Pay Cards! had contestants making poker hands from a board of face down cards. One segment included Wild Cards to help contestants make better hands (a five-of-a-kind was possible on the original) and win more money.

Video Games

• Arcanum: a Fate Point can grant you a critical success in any single task, be it an attack, a spell, or a skill check. They're awarded for completing key objectives, and you only get about a dozen throughout the game.
• In Balatro, standard cards can be transformed into wild cards, which can be used as part of any poker hand that's dependent on matching suits. Wild cards are identified by a smeared suit symbol underneath the card's value.
• Bubble Witch Saga: A rainbow orb boost can substitute for any colored bubble on the screen.
• In I Wanna Lockpick, a Master Key can unlock almost any door regardless of its requirements.
• In Luck be a Landlord, the Very Rare Wildcard symbol gives out the highest coin value in a spin. Card Sharks turn adjacent Suit symbols into Wilds while the Copycat item makes all Cat symbols function like them.
• In Slipways, most of the gameplay revolves around connecting planets needing specific resources with nearby worlds producing those specific resources: if there are no planets nearby with surplus resources of that specific type, you are usually out of luck — unless a nearby planet produces the "Energy" resource, that is, since "Energy" is a wild card that can be used to cover any type of resource deficit.
• In Warframe, the Requiem mod "Oull" can be used as a correct substitute for one of the three Requiem mods that must be installed on your parazon in correct order to strip away your personal nemesis' (Kuva Lich or Sister of Parvos) immortality.

Western Animation

• The Owl House: In “Hooty’s Moving Hassle”, Eda spends most of the episode playing a magical card game called “Hexas Hold ‘Em”. Her main strategy relies on the Wild Card, which incinerates the opponents cards with its fire breath, then mocks the opponent by flexing the figure on the back’s muscles at them.

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