Rummy

Rummy is the group of card games that includes the game Gin Rummy. One can speak of the rummy family of games; to refer to rummy is probably to mean gin rummy, but strictly there is no one rummy game. more...

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It is perhaps more satisfactory to describe these as matching card games. The family extends to include Canasta, for example. David Parlett (The Penguin Book of Card Games, 1978) describes the Mexican game of Conquian as being ancestral to all rummy games.

General features of Rummy-style games

This section describes the common features of the Rummy-style games, including Gin, Canasta, Mah Jong, and games called Rummy.

Books

A book consists of at least three cards of the same rank or consecutive cards of the same suit. This is an almost universal pattern, although there exist minor variations, such as allowing only melds of the first type or requiring in melds of the second type that the cards are all of the same suit or that the cards are all of a different suit. In some games it is required that the melds of the second type contain at least four cards. Some games also feature wild cards, which can be used to represent any card in a meld. The number of wild cards in a meld may be restricted.

Deal

A fairly large number of cards is used. This varies from one standard deck upwards. There are, for example, games that use five standard decks plus some jokers shuffled together.

Each player is dealt 10 cards, not exhausting the entire deck. The rest of the deck is placed face down to form the stock. There is also a face-up pile called the discard pile, which may be initially empty, or it can contain one card, which is turned from the stock.

The Play

In each turn, a player may either take the top card of the stock, or some portion of the discard pile. (Depending on the game, for example the entire pile, or only the top card.) There may be further requirements that restrict taking cards from the pile, for example, you may have to meld the top card of the pile in order to take it.

After you take card(s), you may, depending on the game, make melds and add cards into existing melds by placing the cards that form a meld face-up on the table. In some games, the distinction between your own melds and other players' melds is made, and you may be allowed to add cards only into your own melds. Some games do not make this distinction. Some games allow melding only at the end of the hand.

You end your turn by placing a card from your hand on the top of the discard pile, and the turn passes to the next player. The next player is usually the one in your left, but some games allow anyone steal a turn if they can make certain types of melds with the top card of the discard pile.

Read more at Wikipedia.org