Spite and Malice Rules: How to Play

What you need

• Two standard 52-card decks, shuffled together. Take out the jokers.
• Two players.
• Card values: ace is 1, then 2 to 10, jack 11, queen 12. Kings are wild.
• Suits don’t matter at all. Only the numbers count.

The goal

Be the first player to play every card in your pay-off pile. You can only get rid of those cards by playing them, one at a time, onto the centre piles that both players share.

The deal

1. Shuffle both decks together.
2. Deal each player a pay-off pile of 20 cards, face down. Turn the top card of each pay-off pile face up and leave it on the pile.
3. Deal each player 5 cards for their hand.
4. Put the rest of the cards face down in the middle. This is the stock.

Twenty cards is the classic length. For a quicker game, use 10 cards each; for a longer one, 26. Our online game offers all three.

Who goes first

The player whose face-up pay-off card is higher goes first. A king counts as the highest card here. If both cards are the same, both pay-off piles are shuffled again and new top cards are turned up.

The centre piles

The centre piles (also called building piles) belong to both players.

• A centre pile starts with an ace, or a king played as an ace.
• Cards go on one number higher each time: ace, 2, 3 … up to jack and then queen. Suits don’t matter.
• When a pile reaches the queen, it is finished. It is taken away and shuffled into the stock, and the space is free for a new pile.
• The classic rules (as given on pagat.com) allow at most 3 centre piles at once. Many families play with 4, the same as Skip-Bo. Our game uses 4 by default; you can switch to 3 in Settings.

Kings are wild

A king can stand for any card. On a centre pile, it counts as the next card needed: on a 6 it is a 7, on a jack it is a queen, and on an empty space it is an ace. You can play a king from your hand, from the top of a discard pile, or from your pay-off pile.

Your discard piles

• Each player has up to four discard piles of their own (sometimes called side stacks).
• Any card from your hand can go on any of your discard piles, in any order.
• Only the top card of each discard pile can be played, and only onto a centre pile.
• You can’t move cards between discard piles.
• Pay-off cards never go onto discard piles.
• Only the owner plays from their discard piles.

A turn, step by step

1. Draw up to five. Take cards from the stock until you hold five.
2. Play to the centre. Play as many cards as you like onto the centre piles: the top of your pay-off pile, cards from your hand, and the top cards of your discard piles. When you play your pay-off card, the next one is turned face up.
3. Empty your hand, draw again. If you play all five cards from your hand, draw five more from the stock and keep playing.
4. Discard to finish. Your turn ends only when you put one card from your hand onto one of your discard piles. Then it is your opponent’s turn.

Try it: play from your pay-off pile

An example turn

How the game ends

You win the moment you play the last card of your pay-off pile.

Rarely, the stock runs out and neither player can make a move. Then the game ends, and the player with fewer cards left in their pay-off pile wins.

Scoring

You can simply count games won. To keep a running score, as described on pagat.com:

• The winner scores 5 points for the win, plus 1 point for each card left in the opponent’s pay-off pile.
• If the game stalls, the player with fewer pay-off cards scores the difference between the two piles.
• Play to 50 or 100 points, whichever suits your evening.

Our score sheet and online scorekeeper can score games this way.

Strategy tips

1. Pay-off card first. It is the only card that brings you closer to winning. Look for any way to build a centre pile up to it.
2. Save kings for your pay-off card. A king is most useful when it fills the one gap between a centre pile and your pay-off card.
3. Discard in descending order. Put a 9 on a 10, an 8 on the 9. Later you can play them back up, 8, 9, 10, in one go.
4. Watch your opponent’s pay-off card. If it is a 7, try not to leave a centre pile at 6. Stop at 5 or play past the 7.
5. Empty your hand when you can. Playing all five cards gets you five new ones in the same turn.
6. Keep one discard pile for junk, so your other piles stay in a useful order.

Variations

• Number of centre piles: 3 in the classic rules, 4 in many homes (and in Skip-Bo), or no limit at all.
• Compulsory aces: some players require you to play an ace (and sometimes a 2) to the centre as soon as you can.
• Jokers wild: leave the jokers in and treat them as extra wild cards.
• Longer pay-off piles: 25 or 26 cards each. With 26 cards the game is sometimes called Cat and Mouse.
• Skip-Bo: the boxed commercial version with its own deck (see below).

Spite & Malice and Skip-Bo

Skip-Bo® is a boxed card game based on Spite and Malice. It uses a special 162-card deck: numbers 1 to 12 and 18 wild cards instead of kings. The pile you empty is called the stock pile and holds 30 cards with two to four players, and it uses up to four building piles. A won game scores 25 points plus 5 per card left, with 500 points for a match. The turn itself works the same way. Read our Skip-Bo rules for the details.

Skip-Bo is a registered trademark of Mattel, Inc. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Mattel.