Maw (card game)

Maw was a card game of Scottish origin for two players, popular in Britain in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The earliest records of it date to around 1550, and it became fashionable at court under James VI and I, who is recorded as a player. A hand consisted of five tricks and the aim was to win at least three of them, with the trump five, called the five finger, as a key card. No full description of the rules survives, but a document of about 1600 lists the Groom Porter's laws at Maw, penalties for irregular play, from which it can be worked out that two people played and that a game was 26 points. Maw disappeared from English writing after the Commonwealth, but it is ancestral to the Irish games of twenty-five and spoil five and to the Canadian game of forty-fives.