Slapjack

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This article is about the card game. For the personal weapon, see Slapjack (weapon).

Slapjack is a simplistic card game, generally played among children. It can often be a child's first introduction to playing cards.

Gameplay is as follows: a 52-card deck is divided into face-down stacks as equally as possible between all players. One player removes the top card of his stack and places it face-up on the playing surface within reach of all players. The players take turns doing this in a clockwise manner until a Jack is placed on the pile. At this point, any and all players may attempt to slap the pile to obtain it; whoever covers the stack with his hand first takes the pile and adds it to the bottom of his stack. Gameplay continues with hands of this sort until one player has acquired all of the cards.

The game is related to Egyptian Ratscrew and is also sometimes known as heart attack or snap.

[edit] Variations

• Players attempt to slap the pile as quickly as possible. The last person is forced to take the pile and the player to rid him/herself of all his/her cards is the winner.

• To make the game more complicated, each player when placing their card down must recite ordinal value of the card placed down (relative to the present number of cards in play). For example, the first player in the round will say "one" as she puts down the first card of the round, the second player will put his card down and say "two". The card placed down does not refer to the actual value of the card. If the value of the nth card placed down does match its ordinal value (for example, if the third card put down is actually a three), all players must slap the pile. The last player to slap the pile will be forced to take the pile, usually because this variation follows the variation above. Rules for slapping Jacks still apply.

• Further complication can be added using the "1 up, 1 down" rule. Players count out loud as above, but this time players slap if the value of the card placed faced down is either one higher or one lower than the number that was said out loud. Slapping at the wrong time also causes the player to collect the cards on the pile. It is optional if players should also slap when the number said out loud and value of the card match. These first three rules are commonly used in China, and are what people refer to as snap.

• Players place cards onto the pile until a Jack, Queen, King, or Ace is reached. At that point, the next person to go must put down up to 1, 2, 3 or 4 cards respectively until also reaching one of the said cards. If a face card is not reached, the pile goes to the person who put down the original face card. Additionally, when two cards in a row with the same value are put down, the first person to slap the pile wins it.