About Old Maid
What Old Maid online is
One queen comes out of the deck, the remaining fifty-one cards go around the table, and a single queen is left with nobody to pair with. Matches from the opening hand are discarded immediately, and after that the game is a series of blind draws from a face-down fan, with every new pair going straight to the discard pile. Hands shrink, players drop out as they empty, and nothing is scored at the end. There is only one question worth asking, which is who ended up holding the queen. It all happens in the browser, with nothing to install and no account to create.
Made for small hands and short attention spans
Not many card games can be played correctly by a four-year-old on the first attempt, and this one can, so the design tries hard not to squander that. Ranks are set large enough to read from a shared tablet. Pairs leave the hand the instant they form, which spares a small player from managing cards they cannot physically hold. Taking a card is one unmistakable tap on a face-down fan. All the tension in Old Maid lives in the last stretch, when two players pass one dangerous card back and forth, and the screen is deliberately quiet so that moment is the loudest thing in the room.
Printable guides and rules pages
Four pages of writing back up the game here, and they are kept in step with it as it changes:
- Old Maid RulesRemoving the odd card, matching pairs, and the last card left.
- Old Maid for Young KidsA printable guide for parents and teachers playing with little ones.
- Old Maid StrategyKeeping a straight face and reading which card to draw.
- Old Maid VariationsDifferent odd cards and other ways families play.
Who looks after this site
playoldmaid.com is looked after by Card Games Studio, an independent studio that keeps this game going alongside twenty-some sibling sites, all of them free. Those sites point at one another because they share an owner, not because a link was bought or traded, and the studio page sets out the full roster. The teaching guide carries more weight on this site than on most of ours, since a good share of the people arriving here are adults about to introduce the game to a very young child, so it gets revised whenever the game does. Households play Old Maid a dozen different ways, and if yours follows a rule we have missed, or a hand here behaves strangely, write to hello@coffeebreak.gg.