If you have kids, you’ll probably accumulate some kid editions of snap. Disney has a whole range of them, usually with 36 cards, sometimes with 9 sets of four matches, sometimes with 18 pairs.

They all reproduce the standard rules of snap. Unfortunately, snap is not a very good game, especially not with kids who want to get down to the SNAPPING as quickly as possible.

So here is how we play snap in our house!

SNAP MARK TWO: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

Shuffle your cards and deal out 16 cards in four rows of four, face down. Put the remaining cards nearby.

Pick someone to go first. They choose any card and flip it face up. It stays up from now on.
The next player chooses another card and flips it up. And so on!

If a new card matches one that’s already showing, that’s a snap!

The first person to shout SNAP and touch the card that was already face up gets the pair!

Take the matching pair out of the four-by-four layout, and fill in the gaps from the reserve pile.

And keep going!

Eventually the reserve pile will run out, and you won’t be able to replace cards. The layout will start having a lot of holes in it. Keep going!

When you get down to four cards left, it’s sensible for the game to end. However, kids are not sensible, and they will almost always want to see it through. There might be fights between children at this stage. Deal with this problem by only allowing one child to play the game at a time.

The person with the most pairs is the WINNNNNERRRRR!

(Note: It is possible in a deck of 18 pairs that the 16-card layout will not have any matches. If this happens, just flip over cards from the reserve deck and put them next to the layout until some matches start coming up. Cool? Cool.)

(Note 2: Standard snap has a forfeit if you shout SNAP when there isn’t actually a match. If you really want to have this rule, make players discard a card from their victory pile – half of a matched pair – and count cards to win, not pairs.)