The way I was taught to play Uno, the reverse card changes the direction of play.if you’re taking turns clockwise, it changes it to counterclockwise.
However, I often hear people say “uno reverse card” in the context of saying “whatever you just tried to do to me, I’m turning it around on you”. That seems to me to imply that in the game, the reverse card turns things around on the other player. Like if they play a +2, you can play the reverse card and make them pick up 2. Is that the way some people play?
Is this one of those “house rules” situations where some people make up rules different from the official ones? Like the famous Monopoly rule where people put a pot of money in the middle that you win when you land on free parking, even though the official rules say nothing happens on free parking
I spent a month in Thailand, teaching English in a rural village on the border of Laos. Over the years the Thai teachers had acquired multiple decks of Uno. They merged them into one giant deck and developed some brutal house rules that I still use. They stacked every plus card. So if you put down a +4, the next person could put down a +2, etc. They’d secretly conspire with each other to run a gauntlet of plus cards. I once got in on the action and we went around the circle like three times stacking plus cards. We were targeting my best friend, who was teaching with me. Got like +40 cards or something built up.
Then bro holds up the reverse and that meant the whole plan turned on me. Everyone was roaring with laughter.