Beggar My Neighbour, the card game with nothing to decide

A game with no decisions in it

Start with the catch: nothing is yours to decide. You turn the top card of your stack when it is your turn, and that is all you ever do. Pagat, John McLeod's rules site, says there is no skill in it, and Wikipedia calls it a simple choice-free card game. In War the higher card wins. Here a court card or an ace sets a price for the other player to pay. The only chance is in the shuffle. Once the deck is dealt and the first lead is set, everything after it is forced, and you are watching the game play out. The hook is the reversal: you are paying for an ace, you turn a king, and now the debt is theirs. Our rule of thumb for a game with a friend is that you both know the rules or neither of you does. Knowing them cannot help here at all.

It has more names than most games. Pagat lists Strip Jack Naked, Beat Your Neighbour Out Of Doors and Taxes, plus Suck the Well in Trinidad and Barbados and Bataille Corse in French. Wikipedia says it was likely invented in Britain and known there since at least the 1840s, possibly the same as beat the knave out of doors, mentioned in 1755, and notes that in Dickens's Great Expectations, from 1861, it is the only game the boy Pip knows. We spell it neighbour, as British English does. Neighbor is the same game.

How a round goes

Deal the full 52-card deck face down, 26 each, and nobody looks. Take turns turning your top card onto one pile in the middle. The twos to tens are ordinary. The jack, queen, king and ace are pay cards, and suits never matter.

The prices: jack 1, queen 2, king 3, ace 4.

Turn a pay card and the other player must pay you in ordinary cards, one at a time. Say you turn a queen. If both of their cards are ordinary, you take the whole pile, tuck it directly under your stack and turn the next card. If either is a pay card, your queen is cancelled and now you owe.

Pagat's own example. A turns a queen, and B owes two. B turns a six, then a jack, which cancels the queen. A owes one, turns an ace, and B owes four. B turns a 3, a 7 and a king, and now A owes three. A turns a 10, a 4 and a 6, all ordinary, so the king is paid and B takes the ten cards in the pile and leads.

Three things Pagat does not say

It does not say who leads, so a game here starts with a random lead and alternates after that. It does not say in what order a won pile goes under a stack. We turn the pile over as a block, so the card played first comes back to your hand first. And it allows more than two players without saying who takes the pile or who is out, so we deal two seats and stop there.

Some games never end

Pagat warns that a game can go on a long time, possibly for ever. Ours mostly do not. In our own test, 100,000 shuffled deals played by these rules, the median game took about 190 cards turned and 26 piles taken. Nine in ten were over inside about 530 cards, and the longest went past 2,000. At our auto-play beat of just under a second a card, the median game is about three minutes, and a little longer in a room, where every card makes a round trip.

The records are stranger. Whether every game must end, the finiteness question, was a long-standing mathematical problem from combinatorial game theory, and John Conway listed it among his anti-Hilbert problems, the ones nobody should be working on. Wikipedia gives the longest known game that ends as 1,164 piles, 8,344 cards turned, found by Reed Nessler. Then, in 2024, Brayden Casella discovered a deal that never ends. The arXiv paper, by eight authors with Nessler among them, demonstrates it with a cycle of 62 piles that 30 different starting hands fall into. So not every game is finite. When we replay Casella's deal by our rules, the same position, both stacks in order and the same seat leading, comes round again after 66 piles: four to get into the cycle, then the 62.

So we do not trust every game to end. A game here stops at 3,000 piles taken, or at the first pile after which the position, both stacks in order and who leads, matches one it has seen before, and whoever holds more cards wins. An exact 26 each is a draw, and the board says so. You will almost never meet either: none of our 100,000 test games looped or came near the cap. The references, if you want to check us: the Pagat page on Beggar My Neighbour, the Wikipedia article and arXiv 2403.13855.

Play the Beggar My Neighbour card game online

Open a table, pick one game or best of three, and send a link. The two seats are the host and the guest, with chat while you play and voice if the host switches it on. Nobody signs in and nothing downloads. Or take the computer, which has no strategy to be clever with, because the game has none: it turns its top card on a steady beat, the same move you make by tapping your stack. Pause holds it.

Every card you turn is a tap of your own, so each seat has an auto-play switch that turns your card for you on the beat. It is off until you switch it on, it works while the page is open and in view, and a reload or a lost connection turns it off. Switch it on and talk. While you are playing, the board keeps track of what you cannot decide: whose turn it is, what the last card did and what is owed, such as the guest owes 2 more for the queen. It shows each stack as a count, the whole pile face up, and why your stack will not tap when it will not.

Is there a Beggar My Neighbour card game printable?

No, and no PDF of the rules either: the deck is on the screen. We also do not deal three or four seats, put a computer inside a room with people, or offer a speed setting. There is surely an app somewhere, but here you open a page and play. It is free, and if an ad shows up now and then we will do our best to keep it discreet.