Mau Mau Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

Mau Mau is the German household shedding game and the direct ancestor of several commercial card games. It plays like Crazy Eights with a different set of special cards: match the top of the discard pile by suit or rank, play an action card to inconvenience the next player, and shout Mau when you are down to your last card.

Scoring is one number per player per round with a running total, which makes this a rounds game. The first player out scores nothing; everyone else pays for what is stranded in their hand.

Setup

Use a 32-card pack, either a French-suited deck with the twos through sixes removed or a German-suited Skat pack. Deal five cards each. Turn the next card face up to start the discard pile and leave the rest face down as the stock.

How to play

On your turn play one card matching the top card by suit or by rank. If you cannot, draw one card from the stock; if it plays you may play it, otherwise your turn ends. The action cards are the heart of the game and vary by region, but the widespread German set is:

• Seven: the next player draws two cards. If stacking is on, they can play a seven of their own and pass a doubled penalty along.
• Eight: the next player misses a turn.
• Nine: the direction of play reverses, in the regions that use it.
• Jack: playable on any card. The player names the suit that must be followed next. A jack usually cannot be played on another jack.

When you play your second to last card you must say Mau, and as you play your final card you say Mau Mau. Forget either and you draw two cards as a penalty and play continues.

Scoring

The player who empties their hand first scores 0 for the round.

Every other player counts the cards still in hand and adds them to their running total:

• Jack: 20 each.
• Ace: 11 each.
• Ten: 10 each.
• King: 4 each.
• Queen: 3 each.
• Nine, eight and seven: 0 each.

That last line surprises people. The traditional count comes from German trick-taking games where the low cards are worthless, so a hand of three sevens and a nine scores nothing at all. Groups that find this odd switch to the simpler alternative in which every card counts its printed number, picture cards count ten and the jack still counts twenty.

Nothing is capped and nothing goes negative. Values genuinely vary from region to region and even between families, which is exactly why the jack, the ace and the scheme for the rest are all separate settings.

Worked example with the traditional scheme: a hand of jack, ace, king, seven scores 20 + 11 + 4 + 0 = 35.

Ending the game

Keep dealing until one player's total reaches the agreed penalty limit, commonly 100. Play stops there and the lowest total wins. Groups that prefer a fixed length agree a number of deals instead and compare totals at the end.

Common variations

The full 52-card deck is common outside Germany and makes rounds longer. Some tables let an ace force the next player to skip, some make the seven draw three, and a few require you to play a card on top of an ace or draw. Whether sevens stack is the single rule that changes the feel of the game most.