Spite and Malice

Spite and Malice, also called Cat and Mouse, is a competitive patience for two. You race to empty a personal pay-off pile onto shared building piles. Suits never matter. Kings are wild.

Play every card of your pay-off pile onto the building piles. The first player to do that wins the game.

Two standard 52-card decks, shuffled together (104 cards).

A lobby option adds four Jokers — two black and two red — for a pack of 108. Jokers are off unless you turn them on. Kings are wild either way. A Joker is wild only when that option is on.

Each player receives:

The rest of the pack is the shared face-down stock.

Up to four building piles sit in the middle, all starting empty. Each player also has up to four personal side piles, all starting empty.

The higher face-up pay-off card leads. Ace is lowest, then 2 through 10, Jack, and Queen. Kings and Jokers are equal, and they are higher than a Queen. A tie is broken at random.

A building pile is built one rank at a time, from Ace up to Queen. Suit is ignored.

If a play empties your hand, you immediately draw back up to five, one card at a time, and keep playing. Discarding does not refill the hand — that is the end of the turn.

When the hand is empty and you have nothing left you can play, the turn ends without a discard.

Playing the last card of your pay-off pile wins at once. You do not discard.

Draw from the shared stock. When a draw is needed and the stock is empty, shuffle every completed pile that has been set aside — including piles completed earlier in the same turn — into a new stock, then continue. Wild cards in those piles are ordinary wild cards again.

If the stock is empty and nothing has been set aside, draw whatever is left and play on with a shorter hand.

At the end of a turn, the game is stalled when all of these are true:

The player with fewer cards left in their pay-off pile wins. Equal counts are a draw. A player who still holds cards can always discard, so the game cannot stall while either hand has a card.

The lobby chooses a single game (the default), a match to 50, or a match to 100.

Only the winner of a game scores: 5 points, plus 1 point for every card left in the opponent's pay-off pile. A win on a stall scores the same way. A drawn stall scores nothing.

In a match, a drawn stall is redealt. In a single game, it ends as a draw. Each new deal is a fresh shuffle, and the face-up pay-off cards are compared again to see who leads. The match ends when a player's total reaches the target. Only one player scores from each game, so the totals cannot finish tied.

A computer seat plays these same rules. It plans the whole turn — the cards it builds, then the one card it sets aside. It keeps the line that empties more of its pay-off pile, treats a pay-off card it can play now — or one a card in its hand or on a side pile would unlock — as a card already played, brings a stuck pay-off top closer to a building pile, and buries fewer cards on its side piles. Opening a pile the other player can use immediately counts against that line, by the same amount as handing them the card.

Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert use that same plan. Each step up searches it for longer: Easy for half as long as Medium, Hard for three times as long, and Expert for four times as long.

Your opponent never sees your hand, the face-down cards of your pay-off pile, or the order of the stock. The face-up pay-off top, the building piles, and both players' side piles are public.