Old maid (card game)
card game
Old Maid is a 19th-century American card game for two or more players, presumed to have derived from an ancient European gambling game in which the loser pays for the drinks.
History
The rules of the game are first recorded in a book for girls by Eliza Leslie, who published them in America in 1831 and England in 1835 under the names Old Maid (when played by girls) or Old Bachelor (when played by boys). However, it may well be older and derived from the German game of Black Peter, whose rules are recorded as early as 1821. Meanwhile the rules of the French game, Vieux Garçon, first appear in 1853. All these games are probably ancient and derived from simple gambling games in which the aim was to determine a loser who had to pay for the next round of drinks (cf. drinking game).
These games originally employed a pack of 32 or 52 French cards, the queen of diamonds or jack of spades typically being the odd card and the player who is last in and left holding a single queen or jack becoming the "old maid", "vieux garçon", or "Black Peter" depending on the game. The term "old maid" predates the game and referred to a childless or unmarried woman. In its day it was seen as the equivalent of "old bachelor".
Apart from reprints of Leslie, the game largely disappeared from the literature during the mid-19th century but experienced something of a revival in the 1880s..
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This entry incorporates text from “Old maid (card game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.