How to play Beggar My Neighbour

The deal

Two of you, one standard deck of 52 playing cards, no jokers. Deal every card, 26 each, face down. Your half is a stack you never look at, and you meet each card only as you turn it. Pagat does not say who goes first, so a game here starts with a random lead and alternates after that.

A turn

Turn the top card of your stack face up onto the central pile. That is a whole turn, and it is the only thing you can do, which is why nobody can be good at this game. A two to a ten is an ordinary card and the turn passes to the other player. The jack, queen and king are court cards, and with the ace they are the pay cards. Suits never matter.

What a pay card costs

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

The other player must pay for your pay card by turning that many cards, one after another. If every card they turn is ordinary, you scoop the whole pile, slip it face down under your own stack and lead. Wikipedia calls pay cards penalty cards.

When the payer turns a pay card

Turn a pay card while you are paying and the debt is cancelled on the spot. You stop, and now the other player owes for your new card, at its own price. That can go back and forth for as long as pay cards keep coming, and only the latest one counts.

Pagat's own example shows it. A turns a queen, so B owes two. B turns a six, then a jack: the queen is cancelled and A owes one. A turns an ace, so B owes four. B turns a 3, a 7 and a king, so A owes three. A turns a 10, a 4 and a 6. The king is paid, and B takes the ten cards in the middle.

Where the pile goes

The winner tucks the pile under their stack and leads next. Pagat does not say in what order the cards go, so we turn the pile over as a block and the card played first comes back first. Leading is not much of an edge: whoever led first won about half of 100,000 simulated games.

How a game ends

You lose when you have to turn a card and have none, whether you are leading or halfway through paying. If both of you are down to nothing, whoever has to turn next loses. The other player then holds all 52 cards and wins.

Two cases look like an end and are not. If your last card is a pay card that nobody cancels, you take the pile and stay in. If your last card is a pay card you turned while paying, the other player now pays for it, and if they pay in ordinary cards you take the pile.

A typical game runs about 190 cards turned, roughly three minutes at our auto-play pace, and one in ten passes about 530. Pagat says a game can go on a long time, possibly for ever, and in 2024 Brayden Casella and seven co-authors showed a deal that does (arXiv 2403.13855). So we stop a game at 3,000 piles taken, or at the first repeated position, both stacks in order and who leads, and whoever holds more cards wins. You will almost never see it. Wikipedia and that paper call each pile taken a trick.

Other names and other versions

Pagat files it in its War group of card games and lists Strip Jack Naked, Beat Your Neighbour Out Of Doors and Taxes as other names for it. Wikipedia has it known in Britain since at least the 1840s. Pagat says the names Egyptian War and Egyptian Rat Killer usually mean a more elaborate version, Egyptian Ratscrew, where a pile can also be won by slapping pairs of equal cards. That is not on our table.

With more than two players, the next player around pays, going clockwise in Britain and North America and counter-clockwise for Suck the Well in the Caribbean. Our table plays the two-player version.

How to play Beggar My Neighbour online, and the PDF question

There is no PDF or printable: the rules above are all of it, and the deck lives on the screen. To play online, press the play button for a table with a friend, or the computer button beside it to play on your own. In our opinion it is best played while you talk, since nothing in it needs a thought.