How to play
Liar's Table is a bluffing game: cards go down hidden, claims go up loud, and the player who empties their hand first wins.
The claim
On your turn, put one or more cards face down on the pile and say what they are — “three 7s”. The count is always true. The faces don’t have to be.
Your turn
Follow with your own claim at the same rank (truthfully or not), or draw a card and pass. Drawing frees the rank for whoever plays next. The deck never runs out, so you can always draw — but every card you take is another one to get rid of.
Calling a liar
Every claim is put to the whole table. The moment somebody plays, everyone else has a few seconds to call it a lie or let it stand — you do not wait for your turn, and neither does anyone else. Whoever calls it first is the one who decides. The cards flip: if the claim was true, the challenger takes the whole table pile; if it was a lie, the liar does. Either way the challenger leads the next round with a free choice of rank — calling a liar never costs you your turn. The pile is the stake, so the longer nobody calls, the more it costs to be wrong.
Protected
A Protected card shields a set. If every numbered card you put down with it shares one rank — any rank, not the one you claimed — the challenge fails and the challenger takes the pile. Two 3s behind it claimed as “three 5s” is safe; slip a 5 in beside the 3s and it is not, because the cards no longer agree. A shield over mismatched cards protects nothing and loses you the pile. Spend it on your biggest set, on a fat pile, or on the play that empties your hand.
Must lie
A Must lie card brands its play a lie, even if every other card matched the claim. A challenge against it always sticks. It is a liability — slip it into a small, boring play nobody bothers to call.
Winning
Play your last card and the next player gets one final decision: call it or let it stand. That last one is theirs alone — the table does not get a say in it. If they let it stand — or call it and the challenge fails — you win. If they catch a lie, you pick the pile back up and the game goes on.