It is somewhat similar in nature to the children's card game War, and has spawned a more complicated variant, Egyptian ratscrew.

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

[6] A standard 52-card deck is divided equally between two players, and the two stacks of cards are placed on the table face down.

John Conway once listed this among his anti-Hilbert problems,[8] open questions whose pursuit should emphatically not drive the future of mathematical research.

The longest terminating game known is 1164 tricks / 8344 cards, found by Reed Nessler.

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