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This children's game can be played by two or more players. From a standard 52 card pack remove one queen leaving 51 cards. Deal and play are clockwise.

The dealer deals out all the cards to the players (generally some will have one more card than others - this does not matter). The players all look at their cards and discard any pairs they have (a pair is two cards of equal rank, such as two sevens or two kings).

The dealer begins. At your turn you must offer your cards spread face down to the player to your left. That player selects a card from your hand without seeing it, and adds it to her hand. If it makes a pair in her hand she discards the pair. The player who just took a card then offers her hand to the next player to her left, and so on.

If you get rid of all your cards you are safe - the turn passes to the next player and you take no further part. Eventually all the cards will have been discarded except one queen (the old maid) and the holder of this queen loses.

Old Maid is sometimes played with a special pack of cards: all the cards come in matching pairs except for a single Old Maid card, whose holder at the end is the loser.

Several types of Old Maid cards can be obtained from unclesgames.com.

Traditional with paired occupations and old maid card	Educational, teaching numbers 1-9	Pairs of animals, with buzzard for old maid	Old Bachelor - 1990's version with gender reversed

The collection Hoyle® Card Games for Windows XP or Mac OS X includes an Old Maid program, along with many other popular card games.