Garbage is the card game kids teach each other — which is why every table plays it slightly differently. The standard rules on one printable card, with the layout diagram and the wild-card argument settled in ink.
Garbage is the perfect first card game: the whole strategy is knowing your numbers and the whole drama is flipping a card you desperately need face up out of your own grid. Ten face-down cards stand for Ace through 10. Draw, place, flip what was underneath, place again — a good chain fills half the board in one turn, and a Queen ends it mid-gloat.
Placing a 4 turns up whatever was hiding in the 4-slot. If that's a 7, it goes to the 7-slot and turns up another — the chain keeps rolling until you hit garbage (a Queen, a King, or a rank you've already filled). Ending a turn by choosing the discard instead of the blind stock is the one real decision, and kids find it fast.
Fill all ten and the round ends on the spot. Your reward is a harder game: nine slots next round, then eight, down to a single slot that only an Ace or a wild can fill — the tensest single card flip in children's card gaming. A full game runs twenty minutes; nobody has ever agreed to stop at one game. It sits right beside Crazy Eights and Go Fish in the learn-to-play canon — both playable on this site when the deck's lost under the couch.
Can you swap a wild out later? Standard: yes — draw the exact card a Jack is holding for, swap it in, and the freed Jack immediately fills any other empty slot. That rule is most of the late-round comebacks.
What if the stock runs out? Shuffle the discards (minus the top card) into a new stock and keep going. With the right deck count it rarely happens twice.