Old Maid
Also known as Scabby Queen, Black Peter, Schwarzer Peter, Old Bachelor
- Players
- 2-8 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck with one queen removed (51 cards); 2 decks for more than six players
- Time
- 10-20 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Matching & collecting
Setup
Take a standard 52-card deck and pull out one queen, setting it aside. That leaves 51 cards: twelve ranks still complete at four cards each, and queens reduced to three. Everything can be matched into 25 pairs except one queen, which has nothing to go with. That leftover queen is the old maid. With more than six playing, one account has you shuffle two packs together and still take out just the single queen.
Choose a dealer any way you like; cutting for high card works. Shuffle and deal the entire pack out one card at a time, face down, going clockwise, starting with the player on the dealer's left and finishing with the dealer. It will not come out even. Some players end up with one card more than others, and that is fine and does not affect play.
Everyone picks up their hand and looks at it privately. Before the first turn, each player lays down every pair they were dealt, face up in front of them, and takes no further interest in those cards. A pair is two cards of the same rank; suit and colour are irrelevant. If you hold three of a kind, you may only discard two of them and must keep the third. If you hold all four of a rank, put down two pairs. A player whose whole hand pairs off in this opening discard is left with nothing, and is out and safe before the first turn is taken.
Play
Play moves clockwise. Who takes the first turn is not settled between the published accounts: one has the dealer begin, the other the player on the dealer's left. It changes nothing but who is exposed first, so pick one and say so before you start.
On your turn you hold your hand out to the player on your left, spread face down like a fan so the backs are toward them and no faces show. That player takes one card of their choice, blind, and adds it to their hand. If the card they drew makes a pair with something they already hold, they lay that pair down face up at once. If it does not, they simply keep it.
The player who just drew then becomes the one who offers, fanning their own hand face down to the player on their left, and so on around the table. Cards therefore move steadily around the circle, each player always drawing from the neighbour on their right and always offering to the neighbour on their left.
Shuffling your hand before you offer it is the whole skill of the game. Keeping the old maid in one spot, glancing at it, or holding it slightly proud will get it read instantly, especially by children, who are usually better at spotting a tell than adults expect.
When a player's hand becomes empty, whether by laying down a pair or by having their last card drawn away, that player is out and safe. Skip them from then on. Offering and drawing simply pass to the next player who still holds cards, closing the circle up as it shrinks.
The hand ends when every card that can be paired has been paired. At that point exactly one card is left in the game, held by exactly one player: the odd queen. There is no scoring round and no way to unload it once you are the last player holding cards, so the ending is always the same shape.
Goal & scoring
Your aim is to get rid of every card in your hand and, above all, not to be the one holding the unmatched queen at the end.
There is no point scoring. Everyone who empties their hand wins equally, and the single player left with the old maid loses that hand. Position or order of going out does not matter; being out first carries no extra credit. One account notes that the whole thing can be played inverted, with the holder of the odd card winning instead of losing and nothing else about the game changing.
Because the loser is decided entirely by blind draws and by how well people disguise their hands, results swing wildly from deal to deal. For a longer session, play a fixed number of deals and count how many times each person was stuck as the old maid, with the lowest count winning overall. The Turkish form of the game, described in one account, does exactly that with a stopping rule attached: a penalty point for whoever ends up with the odd card, deals repeating until somebody reaches five, and the lowest score wins.
Variants
Dedicated Old Maid deck — Purpose-made children's decks replace the standard pack with illustrated character pairs plus one unpaired Old Maid card. Play is identical, but the matching is by picture rather than rank, which makes it far easier for very young players who cannot yet read card ranks reliably.
Joker as the odd card — Instead of removing a queen, leave the pack complete and add a single joker. All four queens stay in and pair off normally, and the joker is the card nobody wants. It saves fishing a card out of the pack, and it makes the unmatchable card obvious rather than something to be worked out.
Scabby Queen — A British version, recorded in Scotland and under several other names across England. The queen of clubs is the card taken out, which leaves the two red queens to pair with each other and strands the queen of spades — the scabby queen — as the odd card. The loser then draws from the reshuffled pack to find out how many times the deck comes down edgewise on their knuckles: twenty-one for a queen, ten for a jack or a king, and its own face value for anything else. Black means the raps are hard; red means they are soft.
Black Peter — The continental European form. Every country has its own translation of Peter or Black Peter for it — Schwarzer Peter in Germany. The usual pack is a purpose-made one of 31 or 37 cards whose unpartnered card is a chimney sweep, or in other packs a black cat. With ordinary cards, take a 32-card pack and remove one black jack, which leaves the other black jack as the odd one. The loser traditionally gets a black mark drawn on the face with soot or a burnt cork.
Any odd card — Remove a card at random, face down, without anyone seeing which one it was, so nobody knows what the unpairable card is until the hand is nearly over. This kills the strategy of tracking one known queen and stops experienced players from reading the table so easily.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, Gambiter, Card Game Wiki, Ducksters.