It's a card game my friends and I play at school. It's really frustrating discovering new rules, but fun once you get the hang of it.
It's played with a 52 card deck. Everybody gets dealt either three or five cards depending on the time allowed to play. Much like crazy eights, you lay down cards from your hand of the same suit or number of the current card on the table, and if you don't have a card meeting this requirement, you must draw another card.
Here's the weird twist, there are certain rules you must obey in the game, usually following the template "When x card is laid down, do y action." x being a group such as face cards, even numbers, aces, etc. but two rules cannot be applied to the same x value. Y is usually saying something like "God save the queen" when a queen is laid down or "Have a nice day" when a seven is laid down.
When someone wins a game of five card mao, they may make up a new rule, however this rule must abide by the deck killer rule, in that it may not pretty much destroy the deck too quickly making it so that the dealer has to frequently shuffle again. (Probably not the exact definition, but that's how I can remember it.)
More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game)You should give it a try because it's really fun compared to other card games.
