The History of Egyptian Rat Screw

Egyptian Rat Screw has no inventor, no publisher and no official rule book. It is a folk game: one that survived by being taught from person to person. That makes its history patchy, but the outline is clear. It is the child of two older games, one British and one American, and it picked up its strange name somewhere along the way.

The first parent: Beggar-My-Neighbour

Beggar-My-Neighbour is an old British card game, played in the nineteenth century and probably earlier. Players deal out the deck, take turns laying cards on a central pile, and when someone plays a court card or an Ace, the next player must "pay" a set number of cards: one for a Jack, two for a Queen, three for a King, four for an Ace. If they turn up a court card of their own while paying, the debt passes on. If not, the player who demanded payment takes the pile.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly the face-card challenge in Egyptian Rat Screw, down to the numbers.

Beggar-My-Neighbour has a famous literary appearance. In Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861), young Pip plays it with Estella in Miss Havisham's gloomy house, and Estella mocks him for calling the knaves "Jacks".

The game is pure chance. Once the cards are dealt, the result is already decided, because no player makes a single choice. That makes it a favourite of mathematicians. For decades, recreational mathematicians asked whether some deal could make a game of Beggar-My-Neighbour go on forever. Enthusiasts searched through enormous numbers of deals by computer, and in 2024 a group reported finding the first one that never ends.

The second parent: Slapjack

Slapjack is a simple slapping game, widely taught to children in the United States. Players lay cards on a central pile in turn, and whenever a Jack appears, everyone races to slap it. The first hand on the Jack takes the pile. A wrong slap costs a card.

Slapjack contributes everything that Beggar-My-Neighbour lacks: speed, attention, and a reason to keep your hand hovering over the table.

Putting them together

Egyptian Rat Screw is what you get when you combine the two: Beggar-My-Neighbour's turn structure and face-card challenges, with Slapjack's race to slap. Instead of slapping only Jacks, players slap patterns such as pairs and sandwiches.

The combination fixes the main weakness of each parent. Beggar-My-Neighbour is decided by the deal. Slapjack is over quickly and gets repetitive. Adding slapping gives every player a way to change the outcome at any moment, and the face-card challenges create big piles worth fighting over.

Nobody knows exactly when or where this happened. The game appears to have spread through American schools, summer camps, college dorms and family tables in the second half of the twentieth century, and from there to the rest of the English-speaking world.

Many names, one game

Because the game spread by word of mouth, it collected a long list of names. Besides Egyptian Rat Screw and its abbreviation ERS, people call it Egyptian Ratscrew, Egyptian War, ERF, Ratslap, Bloodystump and more. Some names are polite versions for children; others describe what happens to knuckles after an hour of play.

Different names usually come with slightly different rules, which is part of why no two groups play exactly the same way. Our house rules guide covers the most common variations.

Why "Egyptian"?

Nobody knows. There is no evidence that the game comes from Egypt, and there is no documented explanation for the word. Popular guesses include the pyramid-like shape of the pile, a joke about the "riddle of the Sphinx" feel of the patterns, or simply that the word sounded exotic and stuck. Since the game was never written down in its early years, the honest answer is that the origin of the name has been lost.

The Egyptian theme on this site

This version of the game takes the name at its word. The menu is set among pyramids, and the Legends modes borrow from Egyptian mythology: the Duat Journey through the twelve hours of the night, the Pharaoh's Tomb with its seven guarded chambers, and the Table of the Gods, where you play against Bastet, Thoth, Hathor, Anubis, Set and Ra.

There is also a mode built on Senet, one of the oldest board games known, played in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago. Its original rules were never recorded, so modern versions, including the one here, are reconstructions. In this site's version, every pile you win in ERS moves your piece along Senet's thirty squares.

None of this is a claim about history. It is a game leaning into its own mysterious name, which seems like the right thing to do with a mystery nobody can solve.