Spoons
Also known as Pig, Donkey, Tongue
- Players
- 3-12 players (best with 6)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 15-45 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Matching & collecting
Setup
Three players is the minimum. Thirteen can play the no-stock form described below, which uses every card in the pack; the version described here needs cards left over for a stock, so twelve is the practical ceiling on one pack. One account puts the game at its best with four to seven, though a bigger circle still works as long as everyone can reach the middle of the table. Take the jokers out.
Count the players and put out one spoon fewer: five spoons for six players, seven for eight. Any small object does the job, forks or poker chips or sugar sachets, provided they are all alike and none of them sits closer to one player than another. Cluster them tightly in the exact centre of the table. Reaching toward them is allowed and is a recognised way of unsettling the table; touching one is not, until somebody has legitimately gone.
Two forms of the game are equally standard and you should say which you are playing. This entry describes the version with a stock, which is the one most often meant by Spoons: deal four cards face down to each player, and the dealer keeps the rest of the pack squared face down at their own right hand. The dealer is the only person who ever draws from it. The player on the dealer's right is at the end of the chain and has nobody to pass to, so leave a clear space at their elbow for the discards that will pile up there. The other form uses no stock at all and is in the variants below; one account gives that one as the base game and this one as the variation.
Everyone picks up and looks at their four cards. Sort them fast, because nobody is going to say go.
Play
There are no turns. Once the table has looked at its cards the dealer starts drawing, and from then on everybody runs continuously at whatever speed they can manage.
Only the dealer draws, and each draw sets off a chain down the circle. The rule that governs everything is that you never hold more than four cards: you pass a card you do not want face down to the neighbour on your left, and only then do you pick up the card waiting for you from the neighbour on your right. Discard down to three, take one back up to four, over and over. One card at a time, always in that order, and never a queue of cards sitting in front of you to be sifted through at leisure. Cards travel leftward round the circle for as long as the round lasts.
The player at the end of the chain, on the dealer's right, discards face down onto their own pile instead of passing. Should the stock run dry before anyone has four of a kind, the dealer takes that discard pile and carries on drawing from it, so the circle never actually stops.
What you are collecting is four of a kind. Four aces, four sevens, anything, and suits are irrelevant. The moment you have it, take a spoon. No announcement is required, and the entire art of the game is lifting one so smoothly that the table needs a second to catch up — which is also why it pays to keep half an eye on how many spoons are actually left rather than on the faces around you. Having taken one you may carry on passing and picking up as though nothing had happened, so long as your four of a kind stays intact.
As soon as any spoon leaves the middle, everyone may grab, regardless of what they are holding; you never need four of a kind to save yourself, only a spoon. One player ends up empty-handed, because the middle was one spoon short to begin with.
That player collects a letter, S on the first miss, then P, O, O, N, S. Complete the word and you are out. Every time somebody is eliminated, take a spoon out of the middle too, so the shortage stays at exactly one for the rest of the game.
Grabbing when nobody has legitimately gone is punished — one account has the offender pay for it with their place in the game — so agree before you deal whether a false grab costs a letter or the whole game. A spoon that has been touched and lifted belongs to whoever lifted it, however marginal the grab looked.
One deal is one round, and everything stops the moment the middle is bare. Gather every card up, including the stock and the discard pile, shuffle the lot and deal four fresh cards each. The deal does not simply rotate: dealing carries a real advantage in this version, because the dealer never has to wait for a right-hand neighbour, so one account says the usual arrangement is that whoever got four of a kind first deals the next round.
Goal & scoring
You are not really trying to win rounds, you are trying not to lose them. Assembling four of a kind guarantees you a spoon, but the far more common way to survive a round is simply to react quickly when somebody else does.
The scoring is the word itself, one letter for each round you finish empty-handed, and elimination on completing it. Six lives makes a long game with a big group: every round hands out exactly one letter, so eight players takes at least forty-two rounds, seven of them having to collect six letters apiece before the last one is standing. That is usually what you want at a party. Shorten it by using a shorter word — Pig gives three lives and Donkey six — or drop the letters entirely and knock out the first player to miss.
The last player still holding letters to spare wins, though some tables stop when two are left and call them joint winners. What everybody actually remembers afterwards is not the winner but whoever was caught staring at a pair of kings while the middle of the table quietly emptied.
The players who last are rarely the fastest; they are the ones taking in the spoons and their own hand at the same time. Reading faces works too, which is the argument for gathering your four of a kind slowly and with a bored expression rather than pouncing on it.
Variants
Pig, Donkey and Tongue — Play with no props at all. Instead of taking a spoon, a player completing four of a kind gives an agreed silent signal: a finger on the nose in Pig, hands held up beside the head as ears in Donkey, a stuck-out tongue in Tongue. Everyone else copies as soon as they notice, and the last to react loses a life — three in Pig, six in Donkey, matching the letters of the name. Nothing can be knocked over or fought for, so this is the version for a car, a train or a small table. One account records a rule worth stealing: it is forbidden to talk to a player who has already spelled out the word, and anyone who does joins them.
No stock, everyone passes at once — Strip the pack down to exactly four cards per player — four ranks for four players and so on — and deal the whole thing out. There is no stock and no dealer advantage: everyone passes at once, sliding an unwanted card face down to the left and taking up whatever arrives from the right, over and over as fast as the group can go. When a player is knocked out, remove a spoon and one rank's worth of cards together so the arithmetic stays right. One account gives this as the base game and the stock version as the variation, and it is the older shape: the game was first recorded in this form.
Sudden death — Forget the letters. Whoever fails to get a spoon is out on the spot, and a spoon comes off the table with them. A game with eight players is over in six quick rounds, which suits a group that wants the game as a filler rather than the evening's entertainment. It also raises the stakes on every single grab, since there is no cushion for one lapse of attention. Some stop when two players are left and call them joint winners rather than playing the last duel out.
Five-card hands — Deal five cards each instead of four, passing one at a time as usual, but keep the target at four of a kind so the fifth card is spare. It gives everyone more to work with and makes a set easier to assemble, which speeds rounds up markedly on a big table. Some deal only three each instead and go for three of a kind, which is the version to use with very young children.
Two packs for a crowd — There are only thirteen ranks, so a group past thirteen runs out of sets altogether and a group approaching it leaves the stock too thin to matter. Shuffle two packs together, deal four each as usual, and let a set be any four cards of the same rank, duplicates included. Beyond fixing the arithmetic it puts more live ranks in circulation, so rounds end faster, which matters when a big circle can take a while to get a card all the way round.
Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Game Rules, Gambiter, Official Game Rules, Classic Games and Puzzles.