The most common Spite and Malice vocabulary with short explanations — so you always know what the table is talking about.
Pay-off pile (goal pile)
Your personal face-down stack of 20 cards. Only the top card is visible and playable; every card you clear reveals the next. The first player whose pay-off pile is empty wins.
Build pile (centre stack)
One of four shared piles that starts with an Ace and rises one rank at a time to the Queen. A completed pile is removed and shuffled back into the stock.
Discard stack (side stack)
One of up to four personal face-up piles. Ending your turn means discarding one hand card onto one of them; only the top card of each stack can later be played to a build pile.
Stock
The face-down draw pile in the middle. Hands are refilled from it to five cards, and completed build piles are shuffled back into it. If it runs dry and nobody can move, the game is a stalemate.
Wild Jack
The Jack is wild: it stands for the next higher rank than the card it covers on a build pile (an Ace on an empty pile) and can be discarded without declaring a value.
Queen (Q)
The highest rank (12). Playing a Queen — or a Jack as a Queen — completes a build pile, which is collected and reshuffled into the stock.
Stalemate
The end state when the stock is gone and no player can play or discard. The player with the fewest pay-off cards remaining wins; only an exact tie is a draw.
Turn
Refill your hand to five, play any number of cards to the build piles from your three legal sources, then discard exactly one card from your hand to finish.