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Egyptian Ratscrew

Also known as Egyptian Rat Screw, ERS, Egyptian War, Egyptian Rat Slap, Slaps

Players
2-8 players (best with 4)
Deck
1 standard deck (52 cards); some groups leave the jokers in so the deal comes out even, or add a second deck above six players
Time
15-45 minutes
Difficulty
Easy
Category
Matching & collecting

Setup

You need a flat surface everyone can reach and hit. A table is better than a floor, and a hard surface is better than a bed, because the pile has to stay square enough to see the top card.

Pick a dealer any way you like; if you play a second game, pass the deal to the left. Shuffle and deal the whole pack out one card at a time, face down, going clockwise, until the cards run out. A 52-card pack comes out level only at two, four or thirteen players, and a one- or two-card difference does not matter anyway. Some groups leave the two jokers in so that 54 cards divide evenly at three, six or nine. If you do leave them in, say what they do. One common arrangement makes the pile slappable the moment a joker appears; another treats a joker as an ordinary card that matches nothing; another again has it reverse the direction of play.

Nobody looks at any card at any point, their own stack included. Square your cards into a neat face-down stack in front of you and keep it squared: you play off the top and add winnings to the bottom, so a sloppy stack slows you down and lets people see cards early.

Before the first card is turned, agree on two things out loud. First, which slap patterns are live. Doubles and sandwiches are near-universal and top-bottom is close behind; marriages, tens and runs are extras, and every group plays a different set. Second, what a false slap costs, normally one card burned to the bottom of the pile, sometimes two. Arguments about these mid-game are what the game is famous for.

The player to the dealer's left turns the first card. Play runs clockwise.

Play

On your turn, take the top card off your own stack and flip it face up onto the pile in the middle. Grab it by the far edge and turn it away from you, so that everyone sees it at the same moment. Turning a card toward yourself gives you a fraction of a second's head start on slapping and is treated as cheating.

If the card is a 2 through 10 and does not complete a slap pattern, nothing happens and the turn simply passes to the next player.

FACE CARD CHALLENGES

Jacks, queens, kings and aces stop the normal rotation. When you turn one, the next player owes you a face card, and the rank you played sets how many attempts they get:

That player flips cards from their own stack onto the pile, one at a time, up to that limit. Two outcomes are possible.

If one of the cards they flip is itself a face card or an ace, they stop immediately, even if they had attempts left. The challenge now passes to the player after them, with the count reset by whatever rank was just turned. Challenges can chain around the table several times and the pile gets fat.

If they use up all their attempts without turning a face card or ace, the challenge is over. The player who turned the most recent face card takes the entire pile, puts it face down under their own stack, and turns the first card of a brand-new pile. Play then carries on clockwise from that player, exactly as it does after a slap.

Note that the cards flipped during a challenge are ordinary cards on the pile. They can and do complete slap patterns, which is where most of the chaos comes from.

SLAPPING

Slapping outranks everything, including a challenge in progress. The instant the top of the pile completes a live pattern, anyone at the table may slap it, including the player who just turned the card and including players who are not part of the current challenge. The first hand onto the pile takes the whole thing, adds it face down to the bottom of their stack, and turns the first card of the next pile. Play then continues clockwise from them. Any face-card challenge that was in progress dies with the pile: once the cards have been carried off, nobody owes anybody a face card. Won cards go under your stack in the order you gathered them, never shuffled, which is what makes the pile worth remembering: a double you saw collected comes round again, and next time there may be a card between the two.

The two patterns every table plays:

Top-bottom is nearly as common and is the first one to add: it is live when the card just turned matches the rank of the card at the very bottom of the pile. It only works if somebody remembers what that bottom card was, which is why some groups drop it.

Further additions, all of which must be agreed before the first card is turned: marriage, a king and queen next to each other in either order; a hoagie, which is a double with exactly two cards between rather than one; tens, two cards whose ranks add to exactly ten, counting an ace as one and jacks, queens and kings as nothing at all — and being nothing, a court card between the two is stepped over rather than breaking them up, so 6 then 4 is live and so is ace, king, 9; and runs, four or more cards in consecutive rank order either up or down with suits ignored, ace low unless you also allow it to run king-ace-two.

Suits never matter for any pattern.

If several hands land at once, accounts differ on who takes it: some give the pile to the hand underneath all the others, or to whichever hand has most of the cards under it; others to whoever has the most fingers on top. Settle which before you start.

BURNING

Slap when there is no pattern and you burn a card. Take the top card of your own stack, without looking at it, and slide it face down underneath the pile. You get nothing for it; it becomes part of whatever pile the next winner collects. Some groups burn two cards, and some make a player who false-slaps repeatedly sit out slapping for the rest of the game.

RUNNING OUT OF CARDS

Playing your last card does not eliminate you. You stay at the table with an empty space in front of you and you may still slap. Win a slap and the entire pile comes to you, and you are back in with a large stack. This is why the game can run so long: a player who is down to nothing can be the leader thirty seconds later.

While you have no cards you are skipped in the rotation: nobody waits for you to turn anything, and the turn passes straight on to the next player who still has a stack. How long you keep the right to slap back in is where accounts differ, and it is the thing to settle before you start, because it decides whether the game can end at all. Some let a cardless player go on slapping only while at least two players still hold cards; others let them slap in for as long as the game lasts.

If you run out in the middle of answering a face-card challenge you cannot produce what you owe, and accounts split again on what follows: either the challenge dies there and the player who turned the last face card takes the pile, or the next player round picks up whatever chances were left. A cardless player who false-slaps has nothing to burn; one arrangement gives them a strike instead, with three strikes ending their right to slap for the rest of the game.

The two patterns every table plays, reading left to right up to the top of the pile. A sandwich needs exactly one card between; two cards between makes a hoagie, slappable only if agreed. 7♠ 7♦ 9♣ 4♥ 9♠ 9♣ 4♥ 3♦ 9♠ Double Sandwich Not a sandwich
The two patterns every table plays, reading left to right up to the top of the pile. A sandwich needs exactly one card between; two cards between makes a hoagie, slappable only if agreed.
Extras, live only if the table agreed them beforehand. Tens means two cards adding to ten, an ace counting one and court cards nothing; a run wants four in a row, not three. K♦ Q♠ 6♥ 4♣ 5♠ 6♥ 7♦ 8♣ Marriage Tens Run
Extras, live only if the table agreed them beforehand. Tens means two cards adding to ten, an ace counting one and court cards nothing; a run wants four in a row, not three.
Turning one of these stops the rotation: the next player owes you a face card, and the rank you turned sets how many cards they get to find one. J♠ 1 card Q♥ 2 cards K♦ 3 cards A♣ 4 cards Attempts owed
Turning one of these stops the rotation: the next player owes you a face card, and the rank you turned sets how many cards they get to find one.

Goal & scoring

There is no scoring. You win by holding every card in play, which is 52 with a single pack, 54 if you left the jokers in and 104 with two packs. In practice that means everyone else has been knocked out and you are the only player with a stack in front of you.

Getting all the way there can take a while, because a cardless player who slaps well comes straight back into the game, and a full-table game can swing several times before anyone is genuinely eliminated. It is entirely normal for one player to hold forty cards and lose ten minutes later.

Because of that, plenty of groups set a stopping point in advance: play for a fixed twenty or thirty minutes and give the win to whoever has the biggest stack, or stop as soon as the table is down to two players and call the larger stack the winner. Decide before you start rather than when someone is winning.

The skill is not really reflexes. It is watching the pile rather than your own hand, knowing the pattern list cold so you are not thinking about it, and resisting the twitch slap, because burned cards add up faster than anyone expects.

Variants

Long slap list — Beyond doubles and sandwiches, groups pile on extra patterns: marriage (king and queen adjacent, either order), hoagie (a double with two cards between), tens (two cards adding to exactly ten), top-bottom, four or more cards in consecutive rank order, a flush of three or more cards in one suit, a 6 and a 9 together, which some lists call the ratscrew, jokers as an instant slap, and a designated card such as the queen of spades that is always slappable. More patterns mean more piles change hands and fewer long face-card chains, but they also mean far more disputed slaps, so write the list down if it goes past four items.

Flat face-card counts — Instead of jack one, queen two, king three, ace four, every face card and ace gives the next player the same number of attempts, usually one. This is much easier to teach. Challenges resolve faster and piles stay smaller, which makes the game shorter but takes away the tension of watching someone burn through four chances on an ace. A different rearrangement swaps the ends rather than flattening them, so that a jack gives three chances and a king one.

Harsher false-slap penalty — Instead of burning one card to the bottom of the pile, a false slapper burns two, or hands a card face down to every other player, which on a full table is brutal. A milder alternative used with children is a strike system: three false slaps and you lose the right to slap until the next game. All of these exist to stop the one player who slaps at everything and wins on volume.

Slapping in from outside — Extend the right to slap beyond the table: spectators who never dealt in at all may slap the pile alongside anyone knocked out of it, and a successful slap brings them in with the whole pile as their stack. It keeps everyone involved rather than leaving people watching, at the cost of a game that may never actually end. It is sometimes capped, for example by allowing a player one re-entry only.

Two packs for a big table — Above six players a single deck gives everyone six or seven cards and the game turns over almost instantly, so shuffle two packs together. Duplicate ranks make doubles and sandwiches noticeably more frequent, so the pile moves faster and face-card chains break sooner. Deal it out the same way and keep every other rule identical.

Background

This is a modern American game built on a very old British one. Take Beggar-My-Neighbour, the 19th-century British game of paying for face cards, and add the rule that certain combinations may be won by slapping the pile: what comes out is Egyptian Ratscrew. The slapping itself may not be original either — it may have been borrowed from Slapjack rather than invented here.

That descent explains the shape of the game. Everything to do with face cards and paying for them is inherited and fixed, and every argument you will ever have is about the slapping, which is the part that was bolted on and never standardised. It also explains why the name is such a mess: the same game answers to ERS, Egyptian War, Bloodystump, Ratslap and plain Slap.

Rules checked against Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, Denexa Games, Official Game Rules, Game Rules, Gambiter, Group Games 101, Wikibooks, PlayingCardDecks.