Spite & Malice

Overview

Spite & Malice — also called Cat and Mouse — is competitive patience for two. Two 52-card packs shuffled together, no jokers, and suits are irrelevant throughout.

Each player gets a face-down pay-off pile with its top card turned up, a five-card hand, and four side stacks to discard onto. Between you sit the shared centre stacks, and the first player to empty their pay-off pile wins the round.

That is the whole tension: the centre belongs to both of you. Every card you play changes what your opponent can do next, and a stack you complete may be the opening they needed.

The deal

• Pay-off pile of 13 or 20 cards, chosen in Settings. Only the top card is face up.
• Five cards in hand.
• Four side stacks, empty to begin with.
• Everything else forms the shared stock.

Thirteen makes a brisk round; twenty makes a long tactical one. Online matches always use thirteen.

Only three centre stacks

This is the constraint the whole game turns on: at most three centre stacks are open at once.

An empty slot is started with an Ace, then built upward — Ace, 2, 3, and so on to Queen. Suits never matter, so any 7 continues a stack sitting at 6.

With only three slots, the board is nearly always crowded. If all three are open and none of them wants what you are holding, you are stuck regardless of how good your hand looks.

Kings are wild

A King stands for whatever rank a stack needs. That makes it the answer to any blockage — and worth holding when the rank you need is likely to turn up anyway.

Spend a King to save one turn and you may not have it three turns later when nothing else will do.

Completed stacks return to the stock

When a stack reaches Queen it is completed, and this is where the game differs from most patience: the finished cards are shuffled back into the stock and the slot frees up immediately.

So nothing leaves the game. The twelve cards you just buried will come round again in someone’s hand, and the slot you opened is available to both players — often to whoever moves next, which may not be you.

Completing a stack is therefore not automatically good. Ask who benefits from the empty slot before you finish one.

Taking a turn

You draw back up to five cards at the start of your turn, then play as many cards as you like from three places:

• your hand,
• the exposed top of your pay-off pile,
• the top card of any of your four side stacks.

There is no one-card limit. Empty your hand entirely on centre plays and you draw five more and carry on — a good turn can run a long way.

The turn ends only when you move a card from your hand to one of your side stacks. And there is a rule worth remembering: pay-off cards may never go to a side stack. An awkward card on top of your pay-off pile cannot be discarded out of the way — it must be played to the centre or it stays there, blocking you.

The pay-off pile is the win condition

Only its top card is exposed, so you work down through it in order. Every pay-off card you place is a card closer to winning, which makes it the move to look for first.

The useful habit is to work backwards: look at the exposed pay-off card, then ask what your hand and side stacks can do to make the centre accept it.

Side stacks are storage, not a bin

You choose which of the four stacks receives your end-of-turn discard, and only the top card of each is playable later.

So a careless discard buries a card you wanted. Four stacks means you can keep four different ranks accessible — treat them as four lanes and try to keep them useful, rather than dumping onto whichever is nearest.

Scoring and the match

The round ends when a player plays the last card from their pay-off pile. The winner scores 5 points, plus 1 for every card still in the loser’s pay-off pile.

So winning is not the whole story — winning fast is. A round taken while your opponent still holds fifteen cards is worth 20; the same win against someone down to their last two is worth 7.

A match is four rounds, and the highest total takes it. That means a heavy loss can be recovered, and a narrow win is worth less than it feels.

Strategy and tips

• Play the pay-off card whenever you can. It is the only card that actually advances you.
• Hold Kings for a real blockage. Spending one on a rank that was coming anyway is the commonest mistake.
• Count the three slots. With only three centre stacks, ask what is playable after your move, not just what is playable now.
• Think before completing a stack. The freed slot is shared, and the cards go back into the stock.
• Keep four ranks alive across your side stacks rather than stacking one deep.
• Watch their pay-off pile. Scoring is driven by how many cards they have left, so a fast win is worth far more than a close one.
• Chain your turns. After every play, check the pay-off top, your hand and all four side-stack tops again.

Playing online

Beyond the computer rival, Spite & Malice supports online multiplayer against a real opponent, and it is genuinely cross-platform: the deal is generated from a shared seed so Android, iOS and web clients build an identical layout and stay in step while exchanging only the moves themselves.

Online rounds always use the 13-card pay-off pile.

If you liked Spite & Malice

Double Solitaire is the other competitive patience game here — two Klondike boards racing onto eight shared foundations, in a turn-based or a simultaneous race mode.

For the solo version of building sequences under pressure, Canfield and Klondike are the classics.