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This blogpost is why I get invited to all the parties.
DOS is a card game released by Mattel in 2018 as a "sequel" to the popular card game UNO. Similarities between the two games are obviously apparent. In 2022, Mattel released a 2nd Edition of the game DOS with some updated rules and a slightly different set of cards. I own the 1st Edition of the game and play it somewhat regularly with my girlfriend. The 1-on-1 matches are a good deal of fun and move at a good pace for a slow weeknight. We also will occasionally bring the card game to other functions to play with larger groups of people (up to 4). The official rules say that the game caps out at 4 players, and I think that this is largely a result of the fact that there are only 112 cards and the hands can get quite large. I think that the game would work well with up to 8 players if you just combined two decks, but then shuffling would become even more difficult than it already is.
The game's rules are pretty straightforward and don't leave much room for interpretation. For the most part they are quite explicit on the order of play and the various different rules. However, this is not true for The DOS Rule.
In my 1st Edition copy of the game, with instructions copyrighted in 2022 (slightly different than the above-linked 2017 copyright version), there is a section with the heading DOS RULE, and it reads as follows:
If you ever have exactly two cards in your hand, you must shout out "DOS!" (meaning "two"). If you forget to do so and another player calls out "DOS!" before you, you must immediately draw two cards as a penalty. If this happens during your turn, do not add the penalty cards to your hand until the end of your turn.
This rule leads to a lot of confusion for me.
The rule says that you must call it out "If you ever have exactly two cards in your hand". In other words, once you reach a state of having two cards in your hand, you obtain an obligation to shout out "DOS". But when do you reach that state? Take this example:
At this moment, you have two cards "in your hand", while having three cards "in your hands". You could concievably return the third card to your right hand and select a different one instead. For this reason, I think that it is reasonable to say that you have three in "your hand" still. The "hand" here isn't a literal "hand", but is instead a logical grouping of cards. The game could be played by someone with no hands and this rule should still be enforceable on them for the purposes of disability accessibility. Mattel makes the cards accessible to colorblind individuals by printing shapes that correspond with the colors, so I don't it is reasonable that they would require all players to have hands attached to their body. You may gripe that this rule only serves to punish players and that the handless people already have it hard enough, but I used to have an aunt who had no hands and she was able to live her life just fine. When you spend your whole life without hands, you get a lot better at doing things with your feet. If memory serves, she could even play the piano. It is more reasonable for "your hand" to refer to the group of cards under your immediate control.
This begs the question: When does a card leave your immediate control?
Perhaps you are playing with the "touch-move rule", named after the chess rule of the same name. This rule says that once you touch a piece, you must move it, and that once you release a piece, you cannot change where you moved it to. A parallel rule could be (and sometimes is, as a house rule) drawn in the game of DOS. Here, once you begin moving a card toward the piles, you must play that card. Once you begin to move the card toward the piles, it is effectively no longer under your immediate control, no longer in your hand, and could knock you down to two cards, triggering the DOS rule. You may think that you are "saved" because you could play the card on any of the available piles, but it doesn't actually matter which pile you play it on because it could still knock you down to two cards. However, the touch-move rule is not an official rule in DOS and so I will ignore this potential.
In a game of DOS where you can [hum-ho|flip flop|waffle|be indecisive|move back and forth] and still retain a card in your immediate control (aka a standard game of DOS), I believe that reasonable judgement and common sense dictate that the card is no longer in your hand once it is both:
These two requirements work together to cover all of the edge cases that I can think of. If you drop a card on accident, whether you were in the process of playing it or not, it doesn't leave your "hand". This is unless, of course, you actually drop it on a valid pile, which is indistinguishable from "splashing the pot".
Now that we have established more detailed rules for when you have two cards in your hand, we can turn our attention to the next important question: when do you have to say DOS? The rules say "If you ever have exactly two cards in your hand, which seems pretty immediate to me. You gain the obligation to call out the word "DOS" at the exact same instant that you have exactly two cards in your hand.
Ideally, in card games and in life, you would take care of your obligations as soon as they are assigned to you. This ideal is rarely met in life for most people (including myself, look at how often this blog gets updated), but meeting it in card games is much more achievable. It seems reasonable to me that most people would call "DOS" as soon as they realize that they have only two cards. This assumption is reflected in real-world observations.
The moment that you enter a state of having 2 cards in your hand, you are not racing the entire rest of the table to shout out DOS. This would be result in irreconcileable arguments about who started to say the word first, who finished saying the word first, and who heard whom at what time. You would also have an issue where one person (me) would spend the whole entire game saying the word "DOS" over and over again nonstop. There is no penalty in the rules for calling this out incorrectly, so there is no cost with calling it out. Technically, if you were consistent and fast enough, you could beat everyone else to the punch on their own DOS, effectively making it impossible for you to lose the game. Some people might consider this tactic "cheating", but there's nothing actually against it in the rules, so it would be a valid play (and ruin the game) if the competition to say "DOS" began at the moment that you obtained the obligation. These problems would be completely impassable with multiple people who are prone to arguing.
Thankfully, the race for all other players to call out "DOS" is gated by the active player forgetting to do so. You only have to worry about someone else DOS'ing you "If you forget to do so". There are two starting pistols, not just one, and the starting player gets a head start:
However, this raises a new and more complicated question that will take several more paragraphs to fully flesh out. How can you tell when someone has forgotten to do something?
It isn't reasonable to interpret that someone has forgotten to call out DOS if they have only just entered the state of needing to. It also isn't reasonable to interpret that they have forgotten if it is in their current "stack" of upcoming actions and they just haven't reached it yet. Often in DOS, you reach the state of having exactly two cards at some point during your turn, where you already committed to taking other actions, such as:
Take for example a list of chores. If you assign someone the tasks of doing the laundry, doing the dishes, and sweeping, it would be completely unreasonable to say that they have "forgotten" to sweep if they are still doing the dishes. It would be equally unreasonable for them to be accused of forgetfulness if the dishes are undone and they are sweeping. Choosing the order of non-depending tasks is one of the fundamental rights of man, a truth which is self-evident. They have not even necessarily forgotten to do one of the obligatory tasks if they are sitting on the couch with tasks undone - people need breaks and can't work nonstop for their whole lives. This is where the metaphor begins to fall apart.
If someone is engaged in game-based action besides saying "DOS", they may not have forgotten. They may just not have gotten around to it. However, if they enter a state of rest after finishing some action(s), it would be reasonable to expect that they have forgotten to say the magic word. Why does this double standard exist between chores and cardgames? Because cardgames are competetive, and in turn-based games you are expected to get a move on and complete all your actions so that the next player can take their turn. If you are resting during your turn, you are holding up the game for everyone else at the table (obviously not necessarily a literal table, see above discussion around "hand"). It is naturally expected that players will remain active for the duration of their turn and only rest when they believe that they have completed all of their actions. Maybe this would be different in a card game with long-lived turns. I'm not sure that such a card game exists, but if a card game had individual turns that lasted hours or days, people could reasonably be expected to rest during their turn - this is not the case with DOS, however. DOS turns almost universally take less than a minute.
I think that it is obvious to expect that someone has forgotten to say the word if they end their turn without saying it, starting the competition between all other players to call them out on this fact. However, this is a difficult position to back up when considering rules from the other games in this series.
The 2nd Edition rules are much clearer and obviate the need for some of the above speculation. These newer rules read:
The moment you have 2 or fewer cards in your hand, you must yell “DOS!” to alert the other players you are about to win.
However, if someone catches you and calls out “DOS!” before you (and before the next player begins their turn), then you must draw 2 cards!
I don't own the 2nd Edition version of the game. I own the 1st Edition, which is a fundamentally different game. The 2nd Edition has a distinct (and incompatible) ruleset, a different deck of cards, distinct packaging, and the Mattel website (archive) lists "DOS Second Edition" as "like UNO and DOS card games".
The game DOS is billed as a "sequel" to UNO. Their (similar) UNO Rule reads as follows:
When you play our next-to-last card, you must yell "UNO" (meaning "one") to indicate that you have only one card left. If you don't yell "UNO" and you are caught before the next player begins their turn, you must draw two cards.
Neither the previous nor subsequent games in the trilogy mention "forgetting". It appears to me that in both of those games, the two starting pistols fire at the same exact time. Interestingly, they both explicitly cancel out your obligation to say DOS or UNO at the beginning of the next player's turn. If nobody noticed that you only had one/two card(s) before the next player begins, you got away with the crime scott-free. If we take the above rationale around when an obligation is forgotten, this leaves only a small portion of time after you end your turn but before the next player begins their turn when you could be called out. This greatly increases the challenge of calling someone else's obligation, and may even make it impossible.
When does the next player's turn begin? Does it begin the instant that your turn is over? Does it begin as soon as they start to physically take their first action? Agruably, the first action is to assess the cards in your hand, something that doesn't have an easy physical "tell". Is there any in-between time where it is nobody's turn? It is preposterous to assume that a turn-based card game could have a portion of time where it is nobody's turn. Turns are a fundamental part of the game and to have a section of time "outside" of turns would be to have a section of time "outside" of the game itself.
I think that this is very telling to the assumption that you could only call "DOS" after someone has finished their turn. The same rationale used to acheive that conclusion in DOS 1st Edition could be used in UNO and in DOS 2nd Edition. If the logic behind the firing of the second pistol is in fact sound, it would completely cancel the efficacy of the rule itself and render the whole thing useless. You would never get to actually call "UNO" or "DOS" since the next player's turn begins the moment that your turn ends.
In other words, the second starting pistol must fire at some point during the active player's turn.
The only explanation that I can think of that reconciles this is that the obligation to call out "DOS" (or "UNO") is a high priority obligation, one that trumps all other obligations and plans, rocketing itself up to the top of the list. This is further supported by the fact that this rule has its own header section. It isn't included at the end of some other paragraph or as a bullet point, the game developers thought it so important of an obligation that it should be separately outlined with a bold heading.
With this interpretation, the active player's starting pistol fires as soon as they have exactly two cards in their hand, and everyone else's starting pistol fires as soon as the active player does anything other than say "DOS". This interpretation is the only way that I can think of to mesh together the fact that the active player must forget and the historical understanding that the second starting pistol must fire during the active player's turn. The only way that the historical, future, and present rules make sense is if the second pistol fires the moment that the active player begins some other action.
The "next player" cutoff isn't present in the 1st Edition of DOS. The game technically provides no cutoff, meaning that you could be called out on forgetting to say "DOS" several turns ago. I feel that the spirit of the history of the rule, however, still forces us to take the High Priority Obligation explanation. Additionally, I don't think that the "next player" cutoff is well-enough defined for DOS 1st Edition. In either of the other games, the "next player" is obvious. However, in DOS 2nd Edition, the "next player" could refer to either:
DOS is designed in such a way that you may enter a state of having exactly two cards in your hand on someone else's turn. The 1st Edition's rule says:
If this happens during your turn
The very nature of this word "If" means that these events could happen outside of your turn. This is clear to anyone who has played DOS (1st Edition) and has in fact happened to me on several occasions. It happens like this:
In this position, when does the second starting pistol fire? Does it wait until the player with two cards begins their next turn, taking another action? Or could it fire immediately at the moment that any player takes a new action? We are left speculating on this point, but what seems the most obvious (and fun) to me is that the second starting pistol would fire as soon as any player takes a new action.
In the 1st Edition of DOS, you can play two cards at the same time on one pile. This means that you could go from having 3 cards to having 1 card in a single action, in a single play. Two cards leave your "hand" at effectively the same moment. Do you have an intermediary instant of having only 2 cards in your hand, or do you go straight from 3 to 1? Zeno would have an anyeurysm at the discontinuity of the latter assumption. Going from one point to another without passing through all points in between is unfathomable to everyone except for sci-fi authors.
However, you must consider that the actions in card games are not perfectly continuous and are instead broken up into blocks (I've been calling them "actions" earlier in this post). At the beginning of the action, you have 3 cards. At the end of the action, you have 1 card. How you got from the beginning to the end and what happened in between has no bearing on these states. Additionally, if the two cards exit "your hand" at the same instant, there is no actual point where only one has left your hand.
I don't think that an "intermediary DOS" is well-established, but I still call it out every time anyways just in case it exists.
A card exits your hand the moment that it is not touching your hand and is touching a (legal) pile. A card enters your hand the moment that it is touching your hand and is not touching the draw pile. If you ever have exactly 2 cards in your hand, you immediately obtain a high priority obligation to shout out "DOS". If the next action by any player is anything other than you shouting "DOS", then all other players obtain an opportunity to call you on your laziness/forgetfulness. There is no cutoff for other players calling you on this, even if you no longer have exactly 2 cards in your hand. If they do, then you must draw two cards. If it is your turn, add these two cards to your hand at the end of your turn.
I wish that Mattel had been clearer when writing their rules.
You add the penalty cards to your hand at the end of your turn. The rules are very explicit about that. The penalty cards are not in your "hand" until you are finished with all of the other actions from your turn. If you earlier were in a state of having exactly 2 cards in your hand and nobody called you until you later had 3 cards in your hand during your next turn, you would have to finish playing your turn and then take the penalty cards. If you played 1 card, dropping you back down to 2, on your turn, you would trigger a second occurence of having only 2 cards, given that the penalty cards haven't entered your hand yet. You could be penalized with up to 4 penalty cards on one turn.