Donkey card game: which one do you mean?
Telling them apart in one question
Do you pass cards, or play them to a trick? If cards get passed face down around the table until someone collects four of a kind, you want the matching game. If everyone plays one card to the middle and has to follow the suit led, you want the Bhabhi game — which is the one this site is about.
| Donkey (shedding) | Donkey (matching) | |
|---|---|---|
| Also called | Bhabhi, Thulla, Getaway, Laad | Pig, Spoons (variant) |
| Type | Trick-based shedding | Collecting / matching |
| Goal | Empty your hand | Collect four of a kind |
| Deck | Full 52 cards | Four cards per player |
| The donkey is | Last player holding cards | Last player to touch their nose |
Donkey, the shedding game
This is the game played across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal under a dozen names. Deal the full deck out. The Ace of Spades starts. After that, whoever starts a round plays any card they like and its suit is the one everyone must follow. If everyone can follow it, those cards are discarded and the highest of them starts the next round.
The twist: if you have none of the led suit, you can play any card. That stops the round immediately, and whoever played the highest card of the original suit has to pick up every card played. Empty your hand and you escape; the last player still holding cards is the donkey.
A regional variant played around Kasaragod in Kerala adds a trump suit, which changes the game substantially — off-suit trumps can win tricks rather than just ending them.
Full rules, with a worked example →
Donkey, the matching game
The children’s game, for roughly 3–13 players (4–7 is best). Take as many sets of four matching cards as there are players and deal four to each person.
- Everyone picks one card they don’t want.
- On a count, everyone passes that card face down to the player on their left, all at once.
- Repeat until somebody holds four of a kind.
- That player silently puts their cards down and touches their nose. Everyone else must notice and copy. The last to do it loses.
It is a game of peripheral vision, and it is not related to Bhabhi at all beyond sharing an insult for the loser.
Kazhutha, Kalutai and the rest
“Donkey” is simply the English translation of what the loser gets called in several Indian languages — kazhutha in Malayalam, kalutai in Tamil. In Punjabi-speaking families the equivalent insult is bhabhi, though many tables have moved to “donkey” precisely because it’s the harmless one.