Spite & Malice
Build ace-to-queen piles to empty your pay-off stack. 2–4 players.
Also known as Cat and Mouse.
How to play Spite & Malice
- 1Everyone gets a face-down pay-off pile with its top card turned up. Be the first to play your whole pay-off pile and you win.
- 2Up to four shared building piles sit in the middle. Each starts with an Ace and climbs in order, any suit, to the Queen. A finished pile is cleared away. Kings are wild and can stand in for any card.
- 3At the start of your turn you draw back up to five cards. Play onto the building piles from your hand, from the top of your pay-off pile, or from the top of any of your four discard piles. If you empty your hand mid-turn, draw five more and keep going.
- 4End your turn by putting one card from your hand on one of your discard piles. Any card can go on any of them, but only the top one can be played later.
- 5Pay-off cards can only go to the building piles, never to a discard pile. When the stock runs out, cleared building piles are shuffled in to make a new one.
- 6If nobody can move and there is nothing left to draw, or the game runs very long, it ends there: whoever has the fewest pay-off cards left wins.
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