Beggar-my-neighbour

This article is about the card game. For the British sitcom, see Beggar My Neighbour (TV series). For the economic policy, see Beggar thy neighbour.

Beggar-my-neighbour
Cards are dealt from face-down stacks
Alternative namesStrip jack naked, draw the well dry, beat your neighbour out of doors, beat jack out of doors
TypeAdding-up-type
Players2+ [1]
SkillsCounting
Cards52
DeckFrench
PlayClockwise
Playing timeusually <15 minutes per hand
ChanceComplete
Related games
Battle • Egyptian Ratscrew

Beggar-my-neighbour, also known as strip jack naked, beat your neighbour out of doors,[1] or beat jack out of doors,[2] or beat your neighbour,[3] is a simple choice-free card game. It is somewhat similar in nature to the children's card game War, and has spawned a more complicated variant, Egyptian ratscrew.

Origins

The game was likely invented in Great Britain and has been known there since at least the 1840s.[4]

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.[5]

Beggar-my-neighbor appears as a children's game in 19th-century British novels such as Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861).[6]

Play

A standard 52-card deck is divided equally between two players, and the two stacks of cards 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 or court card (King, Queen, or Jack) 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.[1]

Game theory

A longstanding question in combinatorial game theory asks whether there is a game of beggar-my-neighbour that goes on forever. This can happen only if the game is eventually periodic—that is, if it eventually reaches some state it has been in before. Some smaller decks of cards have infinite games, such as Camicia,[7] while others do not. John Conway once listed this among his anti-Hilbert problems,[8] open questions whose pursuit should emphatically not drive the future of mathematical research.

A non-terminating game was first found by Brayden Casella and reported on 10 February 2024.[9][10] The cyclic game begins ---K---Q-KQAJ-----AAJ--J-- and ----------Q----KQ-J-----KA. The longest terminating game known is 1164 tricks / 8344 cards, found by Reed Nessler.[10]

There are possible combinations of beggar-my-neighbour.[11]

In the 1854 novel Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins, Zach Thorpe and Matthew Grice kill time by playing beggar-my-neighbor "for sixpence a time."

In Charles Dickens' 1861 novel Great Expectations, the game is the only one known by the boy protagonist (Pip) as a child.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Beggar my neighbour, The Guardian, 22 November 2008
  2. ^ "HIPS Finder Ltd". Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  3. ^ "Beat Your Neighbour" in 50 Card Games: 50 Popular Card Games for Hours of Fun. Igloo Books. 2018. p. 17. ISBN 9781784409852.
  4. ^ ""his shop-boy, seated across an empty sugar-tub, was playing a game of 'Beggar-my-neighbor'" The Disgrace to the Family Chapter IV". Retrieved 9 September 2016.
  5. ^ Smith 1755, p. 15.
  6. ^ ""I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me." Great Expectations Chapter 8". 19thnovels.com. Archived from the original on 25 September 2009. Retrieved 29 October 2009.
  7. ^ Alessandro Gentilini, I found that Camicia was declared non terminating. Retrieved 2023-08-07
  8. ^ Guy, Richard K.; Nowakowski, Richard J. (25 November 2002). "Unsolved Problems in Combinatorial Games" (PDF). More Games of No Chance. MSRI Publications. Vol. 42. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521808324. Retrieved 3 December 2018. This problem reappears periodically. It was one of Conway's 'anti-Hilbert problems' about 40 years ago, but must have suggested itself to players of the game over the several centuries of its existence.
  9. ^ Casella, Brayden; Anderson, Philip M.; Kleber, Michael; Mann, Richard P.; Nessler, Reed; Rucklidge, William; Williams, Samuel G.; Wu, Nicolas (19 March 2024), A Non-Terminating Game of Beggar-My-Neighbor, retrieved 23 March 2024
  10. ^ a b Richard P Mann. "Known Historical Beggar-My-Neighbour Records". Retrieved 10 February 2024.
  11. ^ Remy, Beggar-my-neighbour possible games. Retrieved 2023-08-07

Bibliography

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Beggar-my-neighbour".