Beggar-my-neighbour, also known as strip jack naked, beat your neighbour out of doors, or beat jack out of doors, or beat your neighbour, is a simple choice-free
card game
A card game is any game that uses playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, whether the cards are of a traditional design or specifically created for the game (proprietary). Countless card games exist, including famil ...
. It is somewhat similar in nature to the children's card game
War
War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...
, and has spawned a more complicated variant,
Egyptian Ratscrew
Egyptian Rat Slap (ERS), also known as Egyptian Rat Screw, at pagat.com. Retrieved 21 October 2020. is a modern American .
Origins
The game was likely invented in
Great Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the north-west coast of continental Europe, consisting of the countries England, Scotland, and Wales. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the List of European ...
and has been known there since at least the 1840s.
It may be the same as beat the knave out of doors or knave out o' doors, in which case it is much older as this game is mentioned as early as 1755.
Beggar-my-neighbor appears as a children's game in 19th-century British novels such as
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and Social criticism, social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by ...
's ''
Great Expectations
''Great Expectations'' is the thirteenth novel by English author Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. The novel is a bildungsroman and depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after ''Dav ...
'' (1861).
Play
A
standard 52-card deck
The standard 52-card deck of French-suited playing cards is the most common pack of playing cards used today. The main feature of most playing card decks that empower their use in diverse games and other activities is their double-sided design, w ...
is shuffled and then divided equally between two players, and the two stacks of
cards
{{Redirect, CARDS, other uses, Cards (disambiguation){{!Cards
The CARDS programme, of Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development and Stabilisation, is the EU's main instrument of financial assistance to the Western Balkans, covering spec ...
are placed on the table face down. The first player lays down their top card face up to start a central pile, and the opponent plays their top card, also face up, on it, and this goes on alternately as long as no
Ace
An ace is a playing card, die or domino with a single pip. In the standard French deck, an ace has a single suit symbol (a heart, diamond, spade, or a club) located in the middle of the card, sometimes large and decorated, especially in the ...
or
court card
A court is an institution, often a government entity, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and administer justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law.
Courts gene ...
(
King
King is a royal title given to a male monarch. A king is an Absolute monarchy, absolute monarch if he holds unrestricted Government, governmental power or exercises full sovereignty over a nation. Conversely, he is a Constitutional monarchy, ...
,
Queen
Queen most commonly refers to:
* Queen regnant, a female monarch of a kingdom
* Queen consort, the wife of a reigning king
* Queen (band), a British rock band
Queen or QUEEN may also refer to:
Monarchy
* Queen dowager, the widow of a king
* Q ...
, or
Jack
Jack may refer to:
Places
* Jack, Alabama, US, an unincorporated community
* Jack, Missouri, US, an unincorporated community
* Jack County, Texas, a county in Texas
People and fictional characters
* Jack (given name), a male given name, incl ...
) appears. These cards are called "penalty cards".
If either player turns up such a card, their opponent has to pay a penalty: four cards for an Ace, three for a King, two for a Queen, or one for a Jack. They do this playing the required number of cards to the central pile. When they have done so, if all the cards are numerals, the player of the penalty card wins the hand, takes all the cards in the pile and places them under their pack. The game continues in the same fashion, the winner having the advantage of placing the first card. However, if the second player turns up another Ace or court card in the course of paying to the original penalty card, their payment ceases and the first player must pay to this new card. This changing of penalisation can continue for some time. When a single player has all of the cards in the deck in their stack, they have won.
For more than two players, play proceeds clockwise. If a player reveals a new penalty card while paying their penalty, the next player around pays the tax.
Game theory
For a two-player game, a starting distribution of cards that leads to an infinite game was first found by Brayden Casella and reported on 10 February 2024. The cyclic game begins and . This happens because the game is eventually periodic—that is, it eventually reaches some
state
State most commonly refers to:
* State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory
**Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country
**Nation state, a ...
it has been in before.
Whether there is a game of beggar-my-neighbour that goes on forever was a longstanding question in
combinatorial game theory
Combinatorial game theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that typically studies sequential games with perfect information. Research in this field has primarily focused on two-player games in which a ''position'' ev ...
. Some smaller decks of cards have infinite games, such as Camicia, while others do not.
John Conway
John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician. He was active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many br ...
once listed this among his anti-
Hilbert problems
Hilbert's problems are 23 problems in mathematics published by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. They were all unsolved at the time, and several proved to be very influential for 20th-century mathematics. Hilbert presented ten of the pr ...
, open questions whose pursuit should emphatically ''not'' drive the future of mathematical research.
There are possible combinations of beggar-my-neighbour.Remy Beggar-my-neighbour possible games Retrieved 2023-08-07 , the longest game known that does terminate is 1164 tricks long, where the cards of the deck are played a total of 8344 times. It was found by Reed Nessler.
Wilkie Collins
William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist and playwright known especially for ''The Woman in White (novel), The Woman in White'' (1860), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for ''The Moonsto ...
, Zach Thorpe and Matthew Grice kill time by playing beggar-my-neighbor "for sixpence a time."
In
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and Social criticism, social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by ...
' 1861 novel ''
Great Expectations
''Great Expectations'' is the thirteenth novel by English author Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. The novel is a bildungsroman and depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after ''Dav ...
'', the game is the only one known by the boy protagonist (Pip) as a child
pagat.com
Pagat.com is a website containing rules to hundreds of card games from all over the world. Maintained by John McLeod, it contains information for traditional, commercial, and newly invented card games from all over the world. It has been describ ...