All games

Beggar-My-Neighbour

Also known as Beggar My Neighbor, Strip Jack Naked, Beat Your Neighbour Out of Doors, Draw the Well Dry

Players
2-4 players (best with 2)
Deck
1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
Time
15-45 minutes
Difficulty
Simple
Category
Matching & collecting

Setup

One 52-card pack with the jokers taken out, two players for the standard game, and a clear patch of table between them. Shuffle and hand the pack round singly until none is left, which comes to twenty-six apiece. No card is looked at by anybody at any stage, including its owner. Square your half into a face-down stack and keep it squared.

Only four ranks do anything at all. Everything from the 2 up to the 10 is an ordinary card: inert, interchangeable, no different in play from any other. The jack, queen, king and ace are the exceptions, and the game calls them pay cards because turning one puts the other player in debt. Beyond that distinction nothing about a card matters — no card beats another, sequence never comes into it, and suits are ignored from the first turn to the last.

Whoever shuffles deals. Who turns the very first card is not something the accounts settle, so fix it between you before you shuffle rather than after: although neither player will make a single choice all game, who starts is one of the two things — the shuffle being the other — that decides the whole result. Leave the middle clear: a single face-up pile grows there and changes hands over and over until somebody is cleaned out.

With three or four players, deal the pack round as evenly as it will go and set aside nothing — an odd card or two makes no difference to a game with no scoring in it.

Play

Turn the top card of your stack face up into the middle and leave it there. Your opponent lays their next card on top of it, then you again, and so on. As long as only ordinary cards appear, that is the whole game: two people alternately feeding one growing pile.

A pay card interrupts it. Whoever turns one is owed cards by the other player, and the rank of the card sets the size of the debt, running from a single card for a jack up to four for an ace.

The player in debt then turns cards one at a time onto the same pile, counting them out, and one of two things happens.

Cards you win go under your stack in the order you scooped them up. The traditional game involves no shuffling whatever after the deal, which is worth knowing because it is the reason a game can run as long as it sometimes does.

One line covers most of it: run dry before your opponent does and you have lost. That leaves an edge case worth settling before you deal, because a debt is paid as far as it will go — owe four, hold two, and you turn both. If the second of them is an ordinary card you are finished. If it is a pay card you are arguably still alive, since your opponent now owes you and may fail to answer, in which case the whole pile comes across and you carry on with it. Agree in advance whether an empty stack ends the game on the spot, or only when you are next required to turn a card and cannot.

Three or four can play. The turn passes to the left in Britain and North America, while one Caribbean version of the game goes the other way round. The debt always falls on the next player round the table and keeps moving in that direction as it rebounds; a player already knocked out is skipped over. Anyone whose cards run out drops out and the rest continue, and the pile still goes to whoever played the last pay card nobody could answer — that player then opens the next pile. The last player left with cards has all fifty-two and has won.

What each pay card costs the next player. These four ranks are the only ones that do anything; suits are irrelevant and the 2 through 10 are inert. A♠ 4 cards K♥ 3 cards Q♦ 2 cards J♣ 1 card Cards owed
What each pay card costs the next player. These four ranks are the only ones that do anything; suits are irrelevant and the 2 through 10 are inert.

Goal & scoring

You win by ending up with all fifty-two cards, which is the same thing as your opponent running dry. Nothing is scored, nothing is written down, and no pile is worth more than any other.

It is worth being blunt about what this game is. There are no decisions in it anywhere. You never pick which card to play, because the card you play is whichever one the shuffle left on top of your stack; you never pick whether to pay, because paying is compulsory; and since won cards go back in a fixed order and are never shuffled, everything that will happen is fixed by the deal. Two children could in principle hand the pack to an adult, be told who wins, and skip the game entirely. For a five-year-old that is precisely the appeal — all of the suspense with nothing to learn — and for anybody older it is why the novelty lasts about twenty minutes.

The same determinism makes the length wildly unpredictable, and it turned the game into a genuine mathematical curiosity. Think of the two stacks together as a single state of fifty-two cards. Every turn maps one state to exactly one next state, so if a deal ever arrives back at a state it has occupied before, it is trapped: the stretch between the two visits must now repeat, unaltered, without end. Whether any deal actually does this went unanswered for decades, and John Conway used to pose it as an anti-Hilbert problem, a question of no importance at all that nobody could crack. Searches turned up longer and longer finite games — the longest known to end runs to 1,164 pile-collections, over the course of which cards are played 8,344 times — until a non-terminating deal was finally published in 2024.

If you want a game that certainly ends, cap it before you start: play for a fixed ten or fifteen minutes and give it to whoever holds more cards, or agree that the first player reduced below some number has lost. Counting is quick, because the two stacks always add up to fifty-two.

Variants

Jokers in — Leave both jokers in the pack and rank them above the ace as pay cards worth five. Fifty-four cards deal out at twenty-seven apiece with nothing left over, and a joker turned mid-payment is the most brutal rebound in the game, since the opponent has to find five cards and any one of them can bounce it straight back. It makes the pile swing more violently without adding a single decision.

Slapping — Add a reflex layer: when two cards of the same rank land on top of one another, the first player to slap the pile takes it, regardless of who owes what and regardless of any payment in progress. This is the doorway to the noisier games in the same family: Egyptian Ratscrew is this game with slapping added — though the slapping idea may itself have travelled the other way, out of Slapjack. It is the cheapest way to give Beggar-My-Neighbour something a player can actually be good at.

Shuffling your winnings — When you collect a pile, shuffle it before putting it under your stack instead of returning it in order. This is a house fix rather than the traditional rule, and it changes the character of the game: no deal can then cycle forever, because the order is randomised every time cards change hands, so the game ends with certainty. The price is that it destroys the mathematical curiosity that makes the game interesting to anybody over ten.

Paying from a hand — A version in which players hold their cards as a hand they can see and choose which cards to hand over when a debt falls due, rather than paying blind off the top of a stack. It supplies the only decisions the game can have — you hold your own pay cards back for when they will rebound most usefully — at the cost of the thing that makes the ordinary game usable by children who cannot yet fan a hand.

Background

A British game, played there from the 1840s at the latest and possibly far older: it may be the same thing as a game called beat the knave out of doors, which turns up as early as 1755. It has collected a great many names. Taxes is one, Strip Jack Naked another, Beat Jack Out Of Doors and Beat Your Neighbour Out Of Doors two more; in Trinidad and Barbados it is Suck the Well, and in France sometimes Bataille Corse, Corsican battle.

It is the game Victorian children were given, and it shows up in their novels — Dickens gives it to Pip in Great Expectations as the only game he knows, and Wilkie Collins has two men in Hide and Seek playing it for sixpence a time. Its own descendant, Egyptian Ratscrew, is this game with slapping bolted on.

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Gamerules.com, Official Game Rules, Denexa Games, Dummies, Casella and others, A Non-Terminating Game of Beggar-My-Neighbor.