Deal face down
Use a standard 52-card deck with no Jokers. Deal all the cards clockwise, as evenly as possible. Each player keeps a face-down pile and must not look at its cards. The dealer makes the first play.
Shedding · Reaction · 2+ players
Irish Snap
Call the ranks, watch the cards, and keep your hand ready. A match means everyone slaps — and the last hand down takes the pile.
Ready to play
Called rankAceAce → King → Ace
Slap only when the card's rank matches the call.
YYou13 cards
Your cards stay face down.
Game complete
01 How to play
A match.
A rush of hands.
Irish Snap is a race to get rid of your cards. This page has four players: you and three bots. Around a real table, two or more can play; four to eight usually works best.
Count around the table
The dealer reveals their top card in the centre and calls “Ace”. The next player flips a card and calls “Two”, the next calls “Three”, and so on through Ten, Jack, Queen and King, then back to Ace. The count belongs to the whole table: each card advances it once.
Slap a matching rank
If the card's rank matches the call, every player still in the game must slap the centre pile. Suits do not matter. A 7 matches “Seven”; a Jack only calls for a slap when the call is “Jack”. Two consecutive cards of the same rank are not a trigger by themselves.
The slowest collects
The last player to slap takes the entire centre pile and adds it face down to the bottom of their own cards. The player immediately to the collector's left starts the next sequence, calling “Ace”. At this table, missing the slap also counts as being last.
A false slap
Slapping when the call and card do not match makes you take the whole centre pile. The count resets to Ace and play resumes to your left, just as after a matching slap. Watch the card and the call together rather than copying another player's movement.
Get out safely
Players leave when their face-down pile empties, and their turns are skipped. At this table, if your final card makes a match, resolve that slap before leaving: being last can bring the pile back to you. Otherwise you are safe as soon as your cards run out. The last player still holding cards loses.
Playing here
On your turn, click your face-down pile or Flip, or press Enter. Click the centre pile or press Space to slap. Auto-flip lets you concentrate on reacting. Choose a bot reaction pace before starting. Pause freezes both card play and reaction timing; switching away from this tab pauses automatically.
Reveal fairly
At a physical table, move a card into the centre without peeking and flip it away from yourself so everyone sees it together. Agree whose slap was last when palms overlap. Here, recorded reaction times determine the order, and bots can occasionally make a false slap too.
02 History & variants
Counting cards.
Not collecting them.
A British reaction game
Irish Snap is documented as a British game, although its name alone does not establish an Irish origin. It belongs to the lively family of games in which players reveal cards and react with a slap. The ascending spoken count gives it a distinctive rhythm: attention has to follow a changing word as well as a changing card.
The name Slapjack has also been used for this called-rank game. That can cause confusion with the better-known Slapjack in which players slap any Jack and the first hand down wins the cards. In Irish Snap, the slowest player collects and the goal is to shed cards.
A winner instead of a loser
A reported variation requires a player to empty their pile and then successfully join the next legal slap before claiming a win. If that player is last, or slaps incorrectly, they must take the pile and return to play. It gives the end of the game one more moment of suspense.
This page uses the game that identifies a final loser. An empty pile makes a player safe once the current matching slap, if any, has been resolved. Ordinary Snap, jack-only Slapjack and other games with extra slap triggers have different rules and are not combined with this one.