Take a seat.
Flip in turn. Slap doubles and sandwiches. Win every card.
HAND COMPLETE
Waiting for the host to deal.
FREE ONLINE CARD GAME
Slap the pile.
Take every card.
Play Egyptian Rat Screw (Egyptian Rat Slap, ERS) free against one to three computer players, with no download or sign-up. Flip in turn, answer face-card challenges, and press Space to slap doubles and sandwiches before the computer does. Easy, Standard and Expert set how fast it reacts.
Classic Egyptian Rat Screw · 2–4 seats · Win all 52 cards
Updated
New to Egyptian Rat Screw? Learn the rulesHOW TO PLAY
Two to four players. The whole deck is dealt face down and nobody looks at their cards. Take turns flipping onto one pile, answer face cards, and slap the pile when a pattern lands. Hold every card to win.
Egyptian Rat Screw (also written Egyptian Ratscrew, or ERS) is a race: the cards decide whose turn it is, but your hand on the pile decides who takes it.
Play a practice game ↑Players flip the top card of their face-down stack onto the centre pile, one at a time, moving left: press F or Enter, or tap your stack. When a card lands on another of the same rank, that is a double. Anyone may slap it, including the player who just flipped: press Space or tap the pile. The first slap takes the whole pile and flips next. Nobody can flip over a pattern: play waits until someone slaps it.
Two 9s in a row: a double.
The same rank with one card between is a sandwich: 7, King, 7. Doubles and sandwiches are the two slaps every version of the game agrees on, and they are the only two in the Classic rules this table starts with. Suits never matter.
7, King, 7: a sandwich.
Flip a Jack, Queen, King or Ace and the next player must answer with another one. They keep flipping until they turn one up or run out of chances. Answer in time and the challenge passes on to the following player; fail and whoever played the face card takes the pile.
| Card played | Jack | Queen | King | Ace |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chances | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Running out: a player who runs out of cards in the middle of answering passes the remaining chances to the next player who has cards. If nobody else has a card, the challenger takes the pile. A won pile is taken about a second later (press F to take it at once); if the last card made a pattern, it has to be slapped first, and the slap takes the pile instead.
A Queen gives two chances to answer.
Slap when no pattern is on top and you burn the top card of your stack: it goes face down under the pile and belongs to whoever takes the pile next. Burned cards never count towards a pattern. A slap faster than a person could have seen the card, under 0.12 seconds after it landed, is too early and burns too. The Options sheet can raise the burn to two cards.
A 6 and a 7 are close, but not a double.
Choose Extended slaps in Options to add four more patterns. Each counts only on the face-up cards; burned cards are never part of one.
Top-bottom: the top card matches the first card of the pile. It needs at least three cards; with two it is just a double.
Tens: two cards in a row that add up to 10, or two that add up to 10 with one Jack, Queen or King between them (Ace, King, 9). An ace counts as 1; Jacks, Queens and Kings never count towards the ten.
Marriage: a King and a Queen together, in either order.
Run: four cards in order, going up or down: 5, 6, 7, 8 or Jack, Queen, King, Ace. The ace sits both below the 2 and above the King, so a run can turn the corner: Queen, King, Ace, 2 counts, as in Bicycle's rules.
Joker: with the Jokers option on, two jokers join the deck and a joker on top can always be slapped. Jokers are not face cards, so they never start a challenge.NO POINTS, ONLY CARDS
There are no points. You win by holding every card in play: all 52, or 54 with jokers. Cards come to you two ways: slapping a pattern first, and playing a face card the next player cannot answer. Cards leave you by flipping and by burning.
A player at zero cards stays in by default and can slap back in. With Slap back in turned off, running out (once the pile goes to someone else) or a false slap with no cards puts a player out, and the last player in wins and takes the pile. The scorecard counts cards held, slaps won, your fastest and mean slap, cards burned and challenges won.
HOW TO WIN MORE PILES
Every pattern is decided by the card that just landed and the one or two beneath it. Name each card in your head as it lands ("nine… nine!") and keep your eyes on the pile even on your own turn. With Classic rules a pattern lands about once every 12 flips; with Extended rules about once every 7, so the extra rules mostly reward attention.
Pressing as a 9 is about to land on a 9 is a guess, and the table treats any slap under 0.12 seconds after the card as too early: it burns. The near misses are the trap: a 6 then a 7, or 7, King, 8, look like patterns for a split second. A slap you miss costs nothing, even if it lands a second late; a slap at nothing costs a card. When in doubt, wait for the card.
Easy reacts in 0.6 to 0.9 seconds, Standard in 0.33 to 0.48, and Expert in 0.24 to 0.32 after the card is visible. Missed reactions take longer. In 100,000 seeded reaction races, a 0.4-second slap beat one Standard computer about 57% of the time and three Standard computers about 18%. The computers wait for the same card flight you see, so animations on or off use the same reaction bands.
When you are answering a King with three chances, your flips are also new chances for a pattern, and a slap takes the pile from the challenger. When you are the challenger, the pile is not yours until it is taken: the last flip can make a double that someone else slaps first.
With no cards you cannot burn, so a false slap puts you out. A sure double is your way back in; a guess ends your game.
In 30 simulated games per table between evenly matched Standard computers at Normal speed, two players needed about 320 flips (five minutes) and four players about 1,350 flips (21 minutes). Extended slaps made four-player games longer: about 38 minutes. A stronger slapper can finish much sooner. In 30 four-player games per level against three Standard computers, Easy won none, Standard won six and Expert won all 30. A simulated player reacting 250 to 500 milliseconds after the card was visible won about 64% of slaps against one Standard computer and about 11% against one Expert computer.
12-second floor and the short claim window limit.
QUICK ANSWERS
By default a double, two cards of the same rank in a row, and a sandwich, the same rank with one card between. The Extended slap rules in Options add top-bottom, tens, marriage (a King and a Queen together) and runs of four, and the Jokers option makes a joker on top slappable.
You burn the top card of your stack: it goes face down under the pile, and whoever takes the pile gets it. Options can raise the burn to two cards. With no cards left there is nothing to burn, so a false slap puts you out of the game.
One for a Jack, two for a Queen, three for a King and four for an Ace. Turn up any Jack, Queen, King or Ace in time and the challenge passes to the next player; run out of chances and the player who played the face card takes the pile.
Yes. A valid slap takes the pile and cancels the challenge, so the challenger gets nothing. This includes the last card of a failed challenge: a pattern on that last card has to be slapped before the challenger can take the pile, and the slap wins it.
Yes, by default. You stay at the table with no cards and can slap a pattern to rejoin with the whole pile, but a false slap with no cards puts you out. Turn "Slap back in" off in Options and a player with no cards may not slap, and is out once the pile goes to someone else.
Every slap is stamped on a shared clock and the earliest valid one wins. The result shows who slapped first and by how many milliseconds. The slower slap costs nothing, even when it lands up to a second and a half after the pile was taken.
Egyptian Rat Screw, ERS, Egyptian War, Egyptian Rat Slap and Slaps, and in France Bataille corse. They are the same game with small differences in which slaps count; our Extended rules include the tens and marriage slaps that Bataille corse uses.
Nobody knows for sure. The game is a modern American one built on the older British game Beggar-My-Neighbour, which has the same one-to-four payments for Jacks, Queens, Kings and Aces; the slapping is the newer part. No source for "Egyptian" or "rat screw" has been agreed, which is one reason the game has so many names.
Yes. The table seats two to four, and the computer fills every seat you do not take. With two players each gets 26 cards and every challenge passes straight back and forth.
Easy slaps a pattern 0.6 to 0.9 seconds after it appears, is late about one time in five and sometimes slaps a near miss. Standard takes 0.33 to 0.48 seconds and rarely slaps by mistake. Expert takes 0.24 to 0.32 seconds and never slaps at nothing. None can see the order of anyone's cards, and none react before the card is on the table.
It depends on how evenly the slaps are shared. In simulated games between evenly matched computers at Normal speed, two players took about five minutes and four players around 21. When one player wins most of the slaps, as an Expert computer does, a game is over in two or three minutes.
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