Snap
- Players
- 2-6 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 10-20 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Matching & collecting
Setup
Two can play and six is about as many as the game will bear. Past six the table gets too wide to watch and too loud to judge, and the game stops being fun for whoever is refereeing it. Take the jokers out; only the thirteen ranks matter, and suit and colour are ignored from start to finish.
Any method of choosing a dealer will do, since dealing carries no advantage at all. Shuffle well and deal the cards out as evenly as they will go, face down. Hands rarely come out even, which changes nothing.
Nobody looks at a card at any point in this game, their own included. Square your cards into a face-down stack in front of you, with a clear space beside it. That space is where your face-up pile will grow, and it needs to sit where the rest of the table can see it, not tucked behind your arm.
The player on the dealer's left turns first, and the turn moves clockwise from there.
Play
Your turn is one card: lift the top card of your own face-down stack and set it face up on your face-up pile. Flip it away from your body rather than toward it, so the face arrives for your eyes at the same instant it arrives for everyone else's instead of half a second early. Then the turn passes to your left.
What you are watching is not your own pile but the top card of every pile on the table. Two piles showing the same rank is a snap, no matter whose they are and no matter how far apart they sit. Rank only: a red six and a black six match, a six and a seven do not, and a card one layer down is dead for matching purposes however well people remember it.
Whoever gets "Snap!" out first collects both matching piles, turns the lot face down and slides it under their own stack. Winning a snap gains you cards and nothing else. The rotation carries on undisturbed, from whoever was next in order after the card that was turned.
Calling snap on nothing costs you your whole face-up pile, and it does not go to an opponent. It goes to the middle of the table, where it becomes a snap pool. Several false calls make several pools, and they simply sit there. A pool is live in exactly the way a player's pile is: whenever the top card of anybody's pile matches the top card of a pool, the call is "Snap pool!" and the first player to make it takes the pool and the pile that matched it together. So a rash call does not hand a single opponent a card, it puts your cards into a prize anybody at the table can win back.
Two players calling at once is the other way a pool is born. Where you can honestly separate the calls, the earlier one wins. Where you cannot, do not split anything: the two matching piles go to the middle as a pool and play carries on. Pools only grow, so a table that argues a lot eventually plays for a very large prize.
When your face-down stack runs out, turn your face-up pile over without shuffling and keep going from it. A player with nothing in front of them at all, whose face-up pile has just been snapped away and whose stack was already empty, is out, and the rotation simply skips them from then on.
Play continues until one player holds every card. A snap pool left stranded in the middle when everybody else has been emptied out goes to the last player standing, since there is nobody left to race them for it.
Goal & scoring
The aim is to finish holding all 52 cards, which happens once every other player has been emptied out. Nothing is scored, no rounds are played, and a tall stack earns you nothing by itself.
Left to run its course a game can take twenty minutes or end in two, depending entirely on how the ranks fall. Because a single snap moves two whole piles at once, a lead means very little until the table is down to the last two players. Neither published account offers a way of stopping early, so if you want one — a timer, or an agreed number of snaps, with the largest holding taking it — that is a thing to settle at the table rather than a rule to look up.
What actually wins is watching all the piles at once rather than the card in your own hand, and resisting the pull to call on near-misses. Court cards are the ones that catch people, since a jack and a king read as much the same shape at a glance.
Variants
One pile in the middle — Everyone turns their cards onto a single shared pile in the centre instead of keeping a pile each, and a snap is the top card matching the one immediately beneath it. Whoever calls first wins the entire central pile and buries it face down beneath their own stack. The false-call penalty changes with it: instead of forfeiting your pile to the middle, you hand one card face down to the player whose card you wrongly snapped. Both accounts give this as the form for very young children rather than as the ordinary game — there is only one place to look — and one of them notes that if players slap the central pile as they call, you have very nearly arrived at Slapjack.
Only the owners may call — When two piles match, the call belongs to the owners of those two piles and to nobody else, and whichever of them gets it out first takes both. Everybody else must sit on their hands however clearly they saw it. It takes the whole-table scramble out of the game and replaces it with a duel, which is much easier to adjudicate and considerably kinder to whoever is slowest at the table.
Menagerie — Best at about four to eight, and the pause is the whole joke: hunting for the right animal puts adults and children on a far more even footing than a pure reaction test does. Everybody claims an animal before the deal, no two alike. Cards then go round face up, one at a time, so each player builds a pile of their own in view. When two piles show matching cards on top, their owners have to name each other's animal — not their own, and not "snap" — and the first to get it right takes the other's pile. The biggest pile when the pack runs out wins. Some play it with the noise rather than the name.
Grab instead of shout — Set something down in the middle — a spoon, a rolled-up handkerchief — and claim a snap by getting a hand on it rather than by calling. Ties become visible instead of audible: when several hands arrive together the one underneath, in contact with the object, is clearly first. The noise level drops enormously, and the commonest argument in the game disappears with it.
Some other call entirely — Replace the word with something harder to produce under pressure — barking like a dog is the example the sources give — and the first player to do it on a match takes the piles. It is the same idea Menagerie builds a whole game out of, applied as a single house rule, and it reliably slows down whoever has been winning on pure reflexes.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Game Rules, Official Game Rules, PlayingCardDecks, Game On Family, Dummies.