Slapjack
Also known as Slap Jack, Slap-Jack
- Players
- 2-10 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 10-30 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Matching & collecting
Setup
Take the jokers out and clear a hard, flat surface everyone can reach. Two is the minimum and it is not the game at its best — one account puts that at four to ten players — because with two the pile bounces back and forth and a game can run a long time.
Choose a dealer however you like; it matters very little, since nothing about the deal is an advantage. Deal the entire pack out one card at a time, face down, clockwise, until every card is gone. Hands do not need to come out even. With five players two people simply start with an extra card.
Nobody looks at any card, including their own. Square your cards into a tidy face-down stack in front of you. Keep it squared throughout: you play off the top and put winnings on the bottom, and a spilled stack costs you slaps.
Leave the centre of the table clear. That is where the pile builds, and it needs to be within slapping distance of every player, so push chairs in and get elbows off the table before you start.
Neither account says who turns the first card, so let the player to the dealer's left do it, and run the play clockwise from there.
Play
On your turn, lift the top card off your own stack and drop it face up in the middle of the table, on top of whatever is already there. Turn it away from you, holding the far edge, so that everybody sees the face at the same instant. Peeking at your own card before you play it, or turning it toward yourself, is the standard way to cheat at this game and is treated accordingly.
Almost every card does nothing. You turn it, and the turn passes to the player on your left. The pile just grows.
When a jack appears, everyone races to slap the pile. The first hand flat on the pile takes the whole thing: gather it up, square it and slide the lot underneath your own stack, face down. One account has you shuffle the cards you have just won before they go underneath and the other simply puts them on the bottom, so settle that if it matters to you. Play then restarts from the player to the left of whoever won the pile, not from the winner. There are only four jacks in the pack, so piles can get big before one shows up.
If two or more hands land at what looks like the same moment, the bottom hand wins, meaning the one actually touching the cards rather than the back of somebody else's hand. Beyond that there is no published tie-break at all — one account simply observes that a referee helps if the table is competitive about it — so agree in advance how you will settle a call nobody can make.
A jack can also go by unslapped, and there is a rule for it. If somebody covers it with the following card before a hand arrives, that jack is dead: the pile stays in the middle and nobody may take it until another jack turns up.
A slap that lands on anything other than a jack costs you a card. Settling up works like this: whoever turned the card you wrongly hit is owed compensation, so you slide one card off the top of your own stack, sight unseen, over to them, and it goes underneath what they already hold. Where that forfeit ends up is the part people get wrong. It never goes into the centre for the next pile-winner to scoop up, which means a careless hand hands a measurable edge to one named opponent, and against somebody who swings at everything that trickle decides whole games. The rule does have a hole in it that neither account fills: a player who slaps a non-jack that came off their own stack owes a card to nobody in particular. Settle that one before you deal.
When you turn your last card you are not out yet. You stay at the table and you may still slap, so the very next jack is your way back: win that slap and the entire pile becomes your new stack. Miss it, meaning the pile is claimed by someone else while you have no cards, and you are out for good. You get exactly one chance, not an open invitation to keep slapping all game. While you are waiting on it you are skipped in the rotation, since you have nothing to turn; the turn passes to the next player who still has a stack.
There is a second way to spend that chance, and it is a rule rather than a matter for the table: a player holding nothing who slaps a non-jack is out on the spot. Having nothing to hand over does not save them.
A player who is out takes no further part. Their cards are already in circulation, so nothing needs to be redistributed and play carries on around the shrinking table.
Play continues, jack by jack, until only one player is left holding cards.
Goal & scoring
You are trying to finish holding every card in play, all 52 of them. There is no scoring, no rounds and no partial credit. A player who has been knocked out is out, and the last player still holding cards has by definition collected the lot.
A full game does take a while, especially with two players, because a large stack is not safe. One badly judged slap or one missed jack transfers a big pile and swings the whole game. Expect the lead to change hands several times.
If you want a guaranteed finish time, agree a stopping point before you start. One account suggests simply setting a time limit and giving the win to whoever holds the most cards when it runs out.
Speed matters less than people assume. What actually wins is watching the pile rather than your own hand, keeping your slapping hand hovering rather than resting, and not swinging at kings and queens, which at a glance look a great deal like jacks.
Variants
More slappable cards — Add extra triggers to the jack. The two that turn up in the published lists are the double, meaning the top two cards match in rank, and the sandwich, meaning two matching cards with exactly one card between them. Piles change hands far more often and the game finishes sooner. Keep piling on triggers and you arrive at Egyptian Ratscrew, which is the same idea with a longer pattern list and face-card challenges bolted on.
Slap and call — Recorded in one account as a popular version. You must say "Slapjack" as your hand lands, and slapping in silence wins you nothing even if you got there first. The penalty changes too, and it is a much heavier one: call it on a card that is not a jack and the pile is divided evenly among all the other players rather than costing you a single card, so a wild slap gets more expensive in exact proportion to how big the pile had grown.
Irish Snap — The other game filed alongside this one, and effectively its mirror image: the aim is to shed cards rather than collect them. Cards go to a single central pile while the players call ranks aloud in order round the table — ace, two, three and on through king, then back to ace. When the card somebody plays matches the rank being called at that moment, everybody slaps, and the last hand down, the one sitting on top, picks up the whole pile. Slap when the card and the call do not match and you pick it up as well. Counting restarts from ace with the player to the left of whoever collected, and the last player still holding cards loses.
Rules checked against Bicycle Cards, Pagat, Wikipedia, Game Rules, Official Game Rules, PlayingCardDecks, Learning Board Games.