Rattle and snap was a game of chance played with dice that was popular in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. One source says rattle and snap was similar to the game of craps. People gambled cash and property on the outcome, as they did with card games like faro. Andrew Jackson reportedly made $200 and "saved his horse from having a new owner" playing rattle and snap in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1780s. The Rattle and Snap plantation was named for William Polk's fortunate roll of the dice while playing the game shortly after the American Revolutionary War. In 1857 a Lynchburg, Virginia newspaper complained about "gambling hells" where the popular games included "crack-lew, rattle-and-snap, all-fours, bluff, eucre, &c &c." The game was popular in Charleston's black community until the American Civil War. Gaming venues where "seven up, rattle-and-snap, pitch-and-toss, or chuck-a-luck" were played were more commonly sites of interracial intersection than were many other sectors of the antebellum U.S. south.
An 1865 column about the speculative nature of oil stocks described the game as it had been played in olden times in Maryland:
There was an American schooner called Rattle and Snap, based out of North Carolina, that sank in the Delaware River in 1808.