Pay Royalties (based on Beggar Your Neighbor)

This is a quick, kid-friendly, two-player game.

Setting up the deck

Pay Royalties requires four suits of cards. Take either the "Classic" or the "Additional" suits out of the box. To play the classic Beggar Your Neighbor, remove all 0 and 1 cards. For a longer game ("Pay Royalties"), keep them in.

Shuffle the deck, and give each player about half a deck. Each player places their cards face down on the table (or in their hand).

Goal of the game

The goal is not to run out of cards. Run out of cards, and you lose.

How to play

In Pay Royalties, there are two types of cards: royalty (J, Q, K, Ace/Animal) and ordinary (0-X).

The starting player turns up their top card and puts it, face up, on the table. If it’s an ordinary card, the next player "answers" with a card of their own. The moment someone turns up a royalty card, the other player must "pay royalties" immediately by turning over a set number of cards from their hand onto the face-up pile in the middle of the table. You pay one card for a Jack, two for a Queen, three for a King, and four for an Ace.

If, while you’re paying royalties, one of the cards you turn over happens to be a royalty card, the other player must then pay you royalties immediately (i.e, you stop paying out even if you had more cards to pay, and the other player begins).

Once royalties have been paid, the player who charged royalties picks up the stack of face up cards off the table and adds it to their own stack, at the bottom, without shuffling.

Gameplay continues back and forth, until one player runs out of cards.