How to play Old Maid
Old Maid is a simple game of luck for two or more players. Everyone puts down every pair of matching cards. Then the players take turns taking one card, without looking, from each other’s hands. One queen has no partner, and the player left holding it, the Old Maid, loses.
Practice this game. Learn faster by playing: practice Old Maid against two computer players, with a coach beside the cards explaining each turn as it happens.
Practice Old MaidOld Maid at a glance
- Players: Two or more. The practice game uses three.
- Cards: A 52-card deck with one queen taken out, so 51 cards are played.
- Deal: All the cards, one at a time. With three players, everyone gets 17.
- Goal: Put down all your cards in pairs, and do not be the player left holding the last queen.
- How play goes: Each player holds out their cards, face down, to the player on their left, who takes one without looking. If the card makes a pair, the pair goes down. A player with no cards left is safe.
- Ending: The player left holding the last queen, the Old Maid, loses. There are no points.
What you need
Two or more players and one 52-card deck. Take one queen out of the deck and put it away. It does not matter which one: this page takes out the queen of clubs. That leaves 51 cards: three queens, and four cards of every other rank.
A card’s rank is its number or letter: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king or ace. Its suit is spades, hearts, diamonds or clubs. In Old Maid the order of the ranks does not matter, and neither do the suits.
Pairs
A pair is two cards of the same rank: two 7s, two jacks, two aces. The suits do not matter, so the 7 of hearts and the 7 of spades are a pair. A king and a queen are not a pair.
- If you hold three cards of one rank, two of them are a pair and the third stays in your hand.
- If you hold all four cards of one rank, they are two pairs.
The queens are different. Only three are left, so two of them can make a pair, and one queen is always left without a partner. That queen is the Old Maid.
The deal
One game of Old Maid is one deal: the cards are dealt once, and play goes on until someone is left with the Old Maid. Any player shuffles the deck and deals. Hand out all the cards, one at a time, going around the table to the left, until none are left. Your hand is the cards you are holding. Some players may get one more card than others, and that does not matter. With three players everyone gets 17 cards. With four, three players get 13 and one gets 12.
Putting down your pairs
Everyone looks at their hand and puts down every pair, face up in front of them. A pair stays on the table for the rest of the game. When everyone has done this, nobody is holding a pair.
Taking cards
The dealer starts. Each turn goes like this:
- Hold out your cards. Mix them up if you like, then spread them out, face down, so the next player can see the backs but not the faces. Hold them out to the player on your left.
- That player takes one card. They choose any card without seeing its face, and add it to their hand.
- A pair goes down. If the card they took has the same rank as a card already in their hand, they put the pair down, face up. If it does not, they keep the card.
- The turn passes. The player who just took a card now holds out their own hand to the next player on their left, and the same thing happens. Play goes around the table to the left, again and again.
Running out of cards
A player with no cards left is safe. That happens when you put down your last cards in a pair, or when another player takes your last card. Either way you take no more turns. The other players carry on without you: the cards are held out to the next player on the left who still has cards.
How the game ends
The game ends when only one player still has cards. That player is holding a single card, the last queen. It is the Old Maid, and that player loses. Everyone else is safe. There are no points, so to play again, shuffle and deal a new game.
The last card is always a queen. Every other rank has four cards, which can always be put down as two pairs. Only the queens come in an odd number, three, so one queen is always left over.
Worked example. Ana, Ben and Cy sit in that order, and each has the next player on their left (Cy’s left is Ana). Ana deals, so she starts: she holds out her cards to Ben. Ben takes her third card, the 8♥. Ben already holds the 8♣, so he puts the pair of 8s down. Ben now holds out his own cards to Cy, and so on around the table.
Later, Cy has no cards left and is safe, so only Ana and Ben still have cards. Ben holds one card, the 5♦. Ana holds the 5♣ and the Q♥. It is Ben’s turn to hold out his cards. Cy is safe, so the next player on his left who still has cards is Ana. She takes his only card, the 5♦, and it makes a pair with her 5♣. Ben has no cards left, so he is safe. Ana is left holding the Q♥. That is the Old Maid, so Ana loses.
Practice Old Maid
Old Maid is easy once you have seen a few turns, but the order of play is hard to picture from a page: who holds out cards to whom, and what happens when someone runs out. The practice game deals you in against two computer players, shows who is taking a card from whom, and explains each turn as it happens.
Free, in your browser, with the rules and the common beginner mistakes beside the table while you play.
Play a practice gameThree things beginners get wrong
Putting down two cards that are not a pair
A pair needs the same rank. A king and a queen are not a pair, and neither are a 7 and an 8. Because pairs go down face up, the other players can check them. Bicycle’s published rules have players put their pairs down face down. They say that a player found to have put down two cards that are not a pair becomes the Old Maid.
Putting down all three of three of a kind
A pair is two cards. If you hold three cards of one rank, put down two and keep the third. The fourth card of that rank is somewhere else in the game, and the card you kept may still find it.
Showing where the Old Maid is
A smile, a frown, or one card sticking up above the others can tell the next player where the Old Maid is. Mix your cards after each turn, spread them evenly, and hold them out the same way every time. The player taking a card has nothing else to go on, because the backs of the cards all look alike.
Questions people ask
Does it matter which queen is taken out?
Not when pairs go by rank only, which is how this page plays. Any two queens make a pair, and the Old Maid is whichever queen is left over. It matters only in the same-color variation, described below.
Can I keep a pair in my hand?
No. A pair goes down as soon as you have it.
What if the card I take does not match anything?
You keep it. Your hand is one card bigger, and the next player may take it from you.
Who wins?
Nobody. The player left with the Old Maid loses, and everyone else is safe. The oldest written rules, from 1831, call the first player to run out of cards the winner. See the variations below.
Is there any strategy?
Hardly any. The cards are face down, so apart from what the other player’s face gives away, taking a card is luck. The only skill is at a real table, in giving nothing away: mixing your cards and keeping a straight face. The computer players in the practice game take cards at random, so there is nothing for you to give away there.
How many can play?
Two or more. Some descriptions give a limit of 12 players and say to shuffle two decks together when more than six play.
Common variations
- Pairs by rank and color. Some groups only allow a pair to be the same color: hearts with diamonds, spades with clubs. The Old Maid is then one particular card, because taking out a queen leaves the other queen of its color without a partner. Take out the queen of clubs, and the queen of spades is the Old Maid.
- A different odd card. In some countries, where the game has a man’s name such as Black Peter, a jack is taken out instead of a queen, and the player left holding the last jack loses.
- A special deck. Many sets are made just for this game. The cards show pictures, often characters, that come in matching pairs, plus one Old Maid card that has no match. The player left holding it loses.
- A joker as the Old Maid. Add a joker to a full 52-card deck. No queen is taken out, and the joker is the Old Maid.
- An unknown Old Maid. Take one card out of the deck without looking at it. Nobody knows which rank will be left over until the end.
- Only one queen in the deck. The oldest written rules (1831) take out three queens, so only one queen is left from the start.
- Reversed. The mechanics are the same, but the player left holding the odd card wins.
- First out wins. The first player to run out of cards is the winner, and the others play on to see who is left with the Old Maid. This is how the 1831 rules score it.
- Pairs face down. Bicycle’s published rules say to put pairs down face down. Here they go down face up, so everyone can check them.
- Who starts. Some rule books say the dealer starts by holding out their cards to the player on their left. Others have the player on the dealer’s left start instead.
Other names you may hear
At a card table and in older rule books, players use their own words instead. Here is our plain word, then theirs:
- put down a pair — “discard” a pair.
- take a card — “draw” a card, or “pick” one.
- hold out your cards — “offer” your hand.
- three cards of one rank — “three of a kind”. Four cards of one rank are “four of a kind”.
- safe — some rule books say a player who has run out of cards “drops out”.
- the last queen — the Old Maid, or “the odd card”.
- game — one deal. Many card players call a deal a “hand”. Here “hand” means only the cards you are holding.
- Old Maid itself — the same game goes by other names in other places: Black Peter or Schwarzer Peter (Germany), Vieux Garçon or Le Pouilleux (France), Old Bachelor (what the 1831 rules call the version played by boys, with jacks) and Scabby Queen (Britain, where the loser holds the queen of spades). Some of these use a jack instead of a queen as the odd card.
More card-game words are in our glossary. For the games we have not written up yet, the four reference books we recommend cover several hundred between them.