Mau-Mau
Also known as Mau Mau, Tschau Sepp, Auflegen
- Players
- 2-8 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck stripped to 32 cards (A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7 in each suit); a full 52-card pack works too, and two packs suit six or more players
- Time
- 15-30 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Shedding
Setup
The usual pack is the German 32: take a standard deck and remove everything below the seven, leaving ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, eight and seven in each suit. A full 52-card pack is perfectly playable and simply makes the hands longer. From six players upwards, shuffle two packs together and play them as a single deck of 64. Having a card twice over changes nothing here, because no card in this game is ever measured against another; it is only ever laid beside the one showing to see whether they agree.
Rank order does nothing during play. No card outranks any other. A rank is worth knowing for two reasons only: a handful of ranks carry a special power, and every rank has a point value that is charged against whoever is still holding it when the hand ends.
Deal five cards to each player, one at a time, clockwise. Six is also common and makes for a slower, more tactical hand. The undealt cards become the stock, face down in the middle, and the top one is turned up beside it as the first card of the discard pile. Whatever lands there has no power: a seven, an eight, a nine or an ace opening the pile is simply a suit and a rank for the first player to match. A jack needs a decision of its own, its only job being to name a suit — some tables have the dealer name one, others take it from the card at the bottom of the stock.
Pick the first dealer any way you like. The player to the dealer's left goes first, play runs clockwise, and the deal moves one seat left after each hand.
| Players | Each player gets | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 5 cards | One 32-card pack. |
| 3 | 5 cards | — |
| 4 | 5 cards | — |
| 5 | 5 cards | — |
| 6 | 5 cards | Two 32-card packs shuffled together, 64 cards. |
| 7 | 5 cards | — |
| 8 | 5 cards | — |
Play
A turn is one card, laid face up on the discard pile. What you lay has to share either a suit or a rank with the card already showing: a club covers a club, and a nine covers a nine, and either match is as good as the other. Nothing more is asked of an ordinary card. Nor are you obliged to play one: a player who could lay a card but would rather not may go to the stock instead, and may decline the card they draw as well. Some tables tighten that up and make you play whenever you can, so it is worth saying which way you play.
Jacks are the wild card. A jack goes on top of anything at all, and as you play it you name a suit out loud; the next player must follow the suit you named, and that suit holds until somebody legally replaces it. The suit you call need not be one you hold anything in, and calling the jack's own suit is allowed. That includes a jack already showing, though some tables bar jack on jack so a named suit has to be answered properly.
The other cards that may carry a power:
- Seven: the next player picks up two cards. Whether they lose the turn as well is not agreed — some accounts have them draw and then play on regardless. If that player has a seven of their own they may lay it instead of drawing, in which case the debt moves along with two more added to it, and the sevens can stack around the table until somebody runs out of them.
- Eight: the next player is skipped.
- Ace: no two accounts agree. Some have the player lay a second card along with it, some have the next player miss a turn, and some give it no power whatever. Agree on one before you start.
- Nine: where it is used at all, it reverses the direction of play, which in a two-handed game amounts to another skip.
Stop and agree the list before the first deal. Every family has its own, and half the arguments this game generates come from someone assuming the eight does what it did at their grandmother's table.
With no legal card in hand you take one from the stock. A drawn card that fits may go straight down; a drawn card that does not fit stays in your hand and the turn moves on. Some tables have you keep drawing until something playable turns up, which keeps hands moving but swells them alarmingly. When the stock is empty, lift the top card of the discard pile, shuffle everything under it and set it down as a fresh stock. If there is nothing underneath to shuffle, because every other card is in somebody's hand, the stock stays empty: a player with nothing to lay simply passes, and if the turn goes right round with nobody able to play, the hand is blocked and ends with no winner, each player counting what they hold if you are keeping score.
The announcements are what give the game its name. The word "Mau" goes with your second-to-last card, spoken as it lands. "Mau-Mau" is the less settled of the two: many tables keep it for going out on a jack and want nothing said over an ordinary last card, while others call it on whatever the last card turns out to be. Forget either one and any opponent may call you on it before the next card is played, at which point you draw a penalty of two cards and, if you had been going out, carry on playing. Some tables charge a single card instead. Going out on a jack is provided for rather than barred — it is what the second announcement is for, and where a score is kept it can be worth double. Some sets do refuse a finish on an ace, and some refuse one on any card carrying a power at all, on the ground that an effect aimed at nobody is a poor way to end a hand.
Goal & scoring
A hand is won by the first player to empty their hand. Many families stop there, deal again, and never write anything down; the game is short enough that keeping score is optional.
Where a score is kept it is generated by the cards the losers are still holding, and the jack, the most useful card in the pack, is also much the most expensive one to be caught with. Two conventions are in circulation and they run in opposite directions. Under the first, the winner takes the combined total of everyone else's leftovers and the session belongs to the first player past an agreed figure, 150 being the one that gets printed. Under the second, every player books their own leftovers against themselves, the game stops the moment anyone passes the figure, and whoever has fewest points then has won. Neither scheme alters what a card is worth. All that changes is who ends up owning the number.
Values are not standardised, and the table gives one set in circulation. A flatter one also goes about: jacks 20, aces, kings and queens 10 apiece, and everything else at face value. It is easier to remember and levels the court cards out.
Once somebody crosses the line, play the deal in progress out to its end rather than stopping mid-hand. Should two players be past the figure when it finishes, the winner is whichever of them has more points if the winner has been collecting them, and whichever has fewer if players have been counting against themselves. If those two are exactly level, one more deal settles it.
| Scores | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Each jack | 20 | — |
| Each ace | 11 | — |
| Each 10 | 10 | — |
| Each king | 4 | — |
| Each queen | 3 | — |
| Each 9, 8 or 7 | face value | — |
| Each 2 to 6 | face value | Only when playing with the full 52-card pack. |
Variants
Neuner — The Austrian and Bavarian form, whose name simply means "nines". A joker joins the 32-card pack and the nines are the wild cards that let you call a suit. Everything else runs much as usual, but moving that job onto a rank which otherwise has none, and adding a joker on top of it, changes the feel of a hand considerably: there is more wild in the deck than most players are used to.
Tschau Sepp — The Swiss version, played with a 36-card pack and on record since the early 1960s. Its name is its call: where a German table shouts "Mau-Mau" on going out, a Swiss one shouts "Tschau Sepp". Counting up the points left in the losers' hands, which many German tables never bother with, is particularly associated with the Swiss game.
Sevens that do not stack — A live disagreement, and one to settle before the cards go out. In the strict version a seven is simply a two-card penalty, and holding a seven of your own does not save you: you draw and the game moves on. Hands stay smaller and the seven becomes a card you play for tempo rather than a weapon to be saved. In the stacking version a run of three or four sevens can hand somebody six or eight cards at once and effectively end their chances for the deal.
The house-rule layer — The reason no two tables play the same game. Extra ranks pick up powers: a queen may reverse direction, a ten may let you play a second card, a specific card may force everyone but you to draw. Some groups let a card be laid out of turn if it exactly matches the rank showing, which turns the game into a scramble. None of it touches the underlying matching rule, and all of it should be settled before the cards go out rather than argued over mid-hand.
Draw until you can play — Instead of taking one card and passing, a stuck player keeps drawing from the stock until something playable appears, then plays it and ends their turn. Deals last longer, the stock is exhausted more often, and a player who has been unlucky twice in a row can end up holding a dozen cards. It rewards keeping a spread of suits in hand rather than hoarding a wild card.
Background
Mau-Mau is the traditional German shedding game that the modern commercial matching-card games descend from. If you have played one of those you will recognise the shape of it within a turn or two, but this one needs nothing except an ordinary pack of cards. It came out of Germany in the years after the Second World War, with rules in print by 1958 — though German accounts date them to the 1930s and admit that no first sighting of the game has ever been pinned down. It has been a fixture of family card tables in German-speaking countries ever since, which is why almost every household plays it slightly differently.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Game Rules, Official Game Rules, Gambiter, CardgamesHub, German Culture, Palace of Cards.