Old Maid

Overview

Old Maid is the classic matching game: pair up your cards, throw the pairs away, and make sure you are not the one left holding the card that has no partner.

It is played here by four players with a standard deck minus the Queen of Spades. That leaves 51 cards — every rank in complete pairs except the Queens, of which there are three. Two will find each other. One never can.

That last Queen is the Old Maid, and whoever is holding it when everything else has been paired off loses.

How it works

1. Discard your opening pairs. Everyone looks at their hand and puts down any two cards of the same rank, face down. Suits are irrelevant — two 7s is a pair, two Kings is a pair.
2. Draw one hidden card from the next active player clockwise. You cannot see what you are taking.
3. If it pairs, it goes. Draw a 9 while holding a 9 and both are discarded immediately.
4. Otherwise you keep it, and play passes on.

Hands shrink as pairs leave the table. Players who empty their hands are out — safely. The game continues until nothing is left but the odd Queen.

The card nobody wants

The Old Maid cannot be discarded, only passed on. The only way to be rid of it is for the next player to draw it from you — which they will do blind.

So the endgame is a series of coin flips with a shrinking number of cards, and the Queen can change hands three or four times in the final rounds before someone runs out of people to give it to.

Strategy, such as it is

Old Maid is mostly luck, and honestly so — that is why it works for children. But a few things genuinely help:

• Watch what has gone. Once you have seen three Kings discarded, you know the fourth is somewhere specific. Late on, with few cards left, this gets sharp.
• Do not signal. If you hold the Queen, the tell is usually in how you present your hand or react when someone reaches for a particular card. Behave identically whichever card they take.
• Do not park the Queen in an obvious spot. Left end, right end, slightly apart from the rest — opponents notice patterns faster than you expect.
• Shed everything else. Holding the Queen among two cards is far worse than holding it among six. Fewer cards means a higher chance the next player takes the one you want them to take.

That last point is the one real piece of tactics in the game, and it runs against instinct: when you are stuck with the Old Maid, you want more cards in hand, not fewer.

Controls

• Select two matching cards to discard them at the start.
• On your turn, tap one of the face-down cards held out by the next player.
• Pairs discard automatically, and the game tells you when a selection is not a match.

If you liked Old Maid

Donkey is the same idea with more game around it — four players shedding cards, and the last one still holding is the Donkey.

Gulam Chor is the Indian version of exactly this: pair off the deck and avoid being left with the odd Jack. And Bluff takes the hidden-card psychology much further, since there you get to lie about what you are putting down.