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The first indication that the game had gone horribly wrong came when Tenya stood up from his chair and began citing the rules.
Not their house rules, obviously. They’d learned after the disaster of the Monopoly game last week that the phrase "house rules" was capable of practically stunlocking Tenya. As with anything Tenya did, the only rules that mattered were the official ones.
"I would like everyone to note," he announced, pushing his glasses up with the severity of a lawyer presenting evidence before a court, "that stacking Draw Two cards is not technically permitted under the standard ruleset."
Ochako immediately pointed at him from across the table.
"You only care because you have to draw six cards."
"That is completely unrelated!"
"You've mentioned it three times."
"And it remains a violation regardless of how many times I mention it."
Izuku glanced between them while trying unsuccessfully to avoid giggling, because the unfortunate reality was that Tenya somehow became even more intense when dealing with card games than he did during class representative duties. There was something uniquely funny about watching somebody discuss Uno with the same seriousness usually reserved for hero legislation.
"To be fair," Izuku said carefully, "the stacking rule is kind of fun."
"Midoriya, the purpose of rules is not to be fun!"
Ochako immediately burst out laughing. Across the table, Shouto silently placed a red seven onto the discard pile and then folded his hands. Nobody paid him any mind, as the rest of them were still bickering about the stacking situation. The argument continued for another thirty seconds before Ochako finally looked down and frowned.
"Wait." Everybody turned toward her. "When did Shouto get rid of half his cards?"
There was a brief silence as all three of them looked toward Shouto's hand and realized, with mounting horror, that he had somehow gone from a perfectly ordinary number of cards to only three. And the strangest part was that nobody could remember seeing it happen.
"How many cards do you have?" Izuku asked.
"Three."
Tenya set down his own hand very slowly, with the careful deliberateness of someone defusing something.
"How?"
Shouto tilted his head. He seemed to be genuinely considering the question, as though searching for a more satisfying answer than the one he had.
"I played them."
"That's not an explanation."
"It is literally what happened."
"No, but when?" Izuku pressed. "We were all sitting here. We were watching the whole time."
"During the game."
No one knew how to respond.
Shouto, for his part, looked genuinely puzzled by their confusion, which somehow made it worse. Meanwhile, Tenya appeared to have entered a state of genuine concern, because the possibility of Shouto winning had suddenly become real.
"Everyone needs to pay closer attention," he declared. "We have allowed ourselves to become distracted by irrelevant discussions."
"You're the one who started the discussion."
"That is also irrelevant!"
The game resumed with considerably more suspicion than before. Tenya watched Shouto's hands. Ochako watched Tenya watching Shouto's hands. Izuku had repositioned himself at a slight angle that gave him a better view of the full table, which he would have denied if asked. Every card Shouto played was examined with more scrutiny than even Aizawa expected of them during heroics class, while Shouto himself seemed completely unaware that he had become the subject of a small surveillance operation. If he noticed the three pairs of eyes tracking his every move, he gave no indication of it.
A few turns later, he calmly placed down another card and announced, "Uno."
"Oh, absolutely not," Ochako said.
Tenya set his hand flat on the table. Izuku looked up from his cards.
"What?" Shouto asked.
"How did you DO that?!" Ochako asked in disbelief.
"I announced Uno."
"That's not the issue."
Shouto looked around the table, apparently hoping somebody might clarify what the issue actually was. But nobody did.
"What is the issue?"
"None of us were prepared for you to win! We invited you because last night, you said you were bad at card games!" Ochako blurted out, exasperated.
For perhaps the tenth time that evening, Shouto looked completely lost. He glanced at Izuku, who offered a small apologetic shrug.
"I wasn't aware emotional preparation was part of the rules."
"It isn't," Izuku admitted.
"But it should be."
"Why?"
"Because this feels unfair."
Shouto considered that for a moment with the same careful attention he might give any reasonable argument, then nodded.
"That makes sense."
The fact that he accepted this explanation without question somehow made it even funnier.
The next several rounds turned into a coordinated effort to stop him from winning, despite the fact that none of them had actually discussed forming an alliance. One person made a move that protected their own position while also making Shouto's situation significantly worse, and then a second person made the same calculation independently, and then a third, and by the time anyone might have noticed the pattern it had already simply become the shape of the game. The moment Shouto tried to play a card, every Draw Two, Reverse, Skip, and Wild card in circulation mysteriously found its way into his path.
Shouto accepted each setback with remarkable calm, drawing cards whenever required and reorganizing his hand with the patience of somebody sorting paperwork.
"Draw two."
"Okay."
"Skip."
"Okay."
"Draw four."
"Okay."
Eventually Ochako narrowed her eyes.
"Why aren't you angry?"
"Should I be?"
"Most people would be! The whole point of Uno is to get angry when the other players screw you over!"
Shouto looked down at the stack of cards he had accumulated, then back at the rest of the table.
"I don't get it."
"How?"
"Because even if I become angry, I'll still have these cards. My emotional state has no bearing on the result of the game."
For a moment nobody could argue with that logic. Then Izuku laughed so hard he nearly dropped his hand.
The game dragged on for another ten minutes. Ochako, having failed to agitate Shouto directly, pivoted without comment to a different approach. At one point she leaned toward Tenya and murmured something. Tenya's expression shifted. He shuffled his hand twice and then, two turns later, played his Reverse card at a moment that appeared to benefit nobody. Nobody knew what she had said, but to get Tenya to work outside the spirit of the rules… things must truly have been dire. Ochako at least looked satisfied.
Izuku, meanwhile, had been perfectly pleasant and collaborative for most of the evening. He remained so. But at some point he drew a Wild Draw Four, and something in his expression became very still.
Ochako, who noticed this, began quietly restructuring her hand.
Shouto, who did not, played a blue three.
They went round the circle several more times until eventually Tenya managed to place his second-to-last card.
The transformation was instantaneous. One moment he was a normal participant. The next he was sitting perfectly upright, staring at the table with the focus of a sniper.
"Uno."
From the nearby couch, where several members of Class 1-A had gradually gathered to watch the unfolding disaster, Denki shot to his feet.
"UNO!"
Everybody turned.
"Call it out!" he said, pointing at Tenya. "If someone else says it, he has to draw!"
"That is not how that rule works," Tenya said.
"What do you mean?"
"The rule penalises players who forget to say Uno. I said Uno. You would have needed to say it before I said it… and you would need to actually be playing."
Denki lowered his arm slightly.
"...Oh."
"I said it very clearly."
"I thought it was like, a counter-move."
"It is not a counter-move."
"That would actually be really cool, though."
Mina, from the couch, nodded thoughtfully. "Denki's got a point."
The game dissolved into complete chaos after that. People who weren't playing started offering strategic advice. Some of that advice contradicted itself. Some contradicted the rules. Denki suggested, at one point, that Tenya should simply eat the cards he didn't want, which Tenya found deeply upsetting. A surprising amount of the remaining advice seemed motivated purely by a desire to make things worse for everyone involved.
By the time somebody finally won (Shouto, as it turned out, though the announcement was absorbed into an argument about whether Denki had been allowed to offer advice at all) the original game bore only a passing resemblance to Uno.
What everybody agreed on, without quite saying so, was that it had been a disaster in a way that felt worth repeating. As they began shuffling the deck for another round, Shouto looked around the table and frowned slightly.
"I have another question."
The collective groan was immediate.
"I haven't asked it yet."
"That somehow makes it worse," Ochako replied.
Shouto glanced down at the cards.
"If Uno means one..."
Everybody braced themselves.
"...why is the game played with more than one card?"
The resulting silence lasted nearly ten seconds.
And then Tenya’s engines short-circuited.