Sorry! Rules

Sorry! runs entirely on a deck of movement cards instead of dice — every card tells you exactly how far to move or what special action to take, which means there's no random number generator at all, only the shuffle of the deck deciding what options you have on a given turn.

Setup

Each of two to four players gets four pawns of their own color, all starting in that color's Start area, plus a full track around the board leading to that color's own Home area. Shuffle the Sorry! card deck and place it face down as the draw pile.

Playing a Turn

Draw the top card and follow its instruction exactly — most cards move a pawn forward a fixed number of spaces, but several carry a special action instead: a 1 or 2 lets you move a pawn out of Start onto the board; an 11 lets you move 11 spaces OR swap places with any opponent's pawn elsewhere on the track; a 4 moves you backward instead of forward; and the card that gives the game its name, Sorry!, lets you pull any pawn straight from Start and place it directly on top of any opponent's pawn currently on the board, sending that pawn all the way back to its own Start — the single most disruptive move in the game, and the reason it's the one every player secretly hopes to draw.

Bumping, Slides, and Safety Zones

Landing exactly on a space already occupied by an opponent's pawn bumps that pawn back to its own Start immediately — this "bump" mechanic is the game's main source of real conflict, since it can undo several turns of an opponent's progress in a single move. Landing on the start space of one of the board's colored slides carries your pawn automatically to the far end of that slide, bumping any pawn along the way in the process. The home stretch leading into your own Home area is a safety zone no opponent pawn can enter or bump you from, which is why racing a pawn into that final stretch is usually the safest move available once it's within reach.

Winning

The first player to get all four of their pawns completely into their Home area wins. Because pawns can be sent backward at almost any point up until they reach the safety of the home stretch, a player who looks comfortably ahead can be reset dramatically by a well-timed Sorry! card, which is a large part of why games can swing late even when one side seems to be winning easily.

Where Sorry! Came From

Sorry! was created by Englishman William Henry Storey, who based it on the much older Indian cross-and-circle game Pachisi, registering the Sorry! trademark in 1929 and manufacturing it in Britain through British card manufacturers before Parker Brothers acquired the American rights in 1934. Its lineage back to Pachisi is shared with several other well-known board games built on the same "race your pieces around a track and back home" skeleton, though Sorry! is distinctive for replacing dice entirely with its movement-card deck and building the bump-and-send-back mechanic into the deck's specific cards rather than leaving it as an optional house rule.

Playing With Three Instead of Four

With three players, one color's pawns and Start area simply go unused, and the board's Home stretch layout stays otherwise identical — the game plays essentially the same as with four, though the reduced player count means bumps happen somewhat less often purely because there are fewer opposing pawns on the board to land on at any given moment. This makes three-player games noticeably faster on average, since fewer pawns are competing for the same limited safe zones.

The Arguments This Game Actually Produces

The most common dispute is whether a pawn moved via the 11 card's swap option can swap with a pawn sitting safely in an opponent's home stretch (it can't — home stretches and Home itself are protected from any swap or bump). A second common argument is whether a Sorry! card can be played on a pawn that's inside a safety zone (it can't, for the same reason).

Questions People Still Ask Mid-Game

Can you decline to bump an opponent if landing on their space is optional? No — landing exactly on an occupied space bumps that pawn automatically; there's no rule allowing you to land there without triggering the bump.

What happens if you draw a Sorry! card but have no pawns left in Start to play it with? The card can't be used that turn and you simply draw again or, depending on house rules, discard it and lose that turn's move entirely.

Does the 4 card's backward move apply to a pawn already in the home stretch? Yes, if there's room to move it backward within the stretch itself — a pawn only becomes fully immune to backward movement once it reaches Home.