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Rummy

The original draw-and-discard game: take a card, build sets and runs, and shed your hand onto the table before anyone else empties theirs. Play against one, two, or three computer opponents — and go out in a single turn to score double.

Your turn — draw from the stock or the discard pile.

You 0
Left 0
Across 0
Right 0
to 100
Left
Across
Right · dealer
Stock · 23
Discard

No melds on the table yet — three of a kind, or three in a row of one suit, starts one.

You
In hand: 41 pts

More Rummy variants

Rummy: the game a hundred games came from

Rummy isn't just a card game — it's the founding member of the largest family in card games. The draw-a-card, make-your-melds, throw-a-card loop at its heart powers Gin Rummy, Canasta, 500 Rum, and dozens of regional cousins on every continent. The basic version on this page — sometimes called straight rummy to distinguish it from its descendants — is the simplest expression of the idea, and still one of the best: every turn you take exactly one card in and put exactly one card out, and the whole game lives in choosing which two. That clean loop is easy to learn in five minutes and hard to put down, because every discard you throw is information — and possibly ammunition — for the player on your left.

Where it comes from

Rummy's most widely accepted ancestor is Conquian, a game played in Mexico and the American Southwest by the mid-1800s with a 40-card Spanish deck — already recognizably rummy: draw, meld sets and runs, discard, go out. Some historians push the lineage further back to Chinese draw-and-discard games like Khanhoo, which share the same match-and-shed skeleton (Mahjong is arguably rummy with tiles). The English name arrived in the early 1900s in America, and nobody is quite sure where from — candidate theories include the British slang rum ("odd, peculiar"), the drink the losers allegedly bought, and the game Rum Poker. What's certain is the timing of its boom: rummy spread through American homes in the 1930s and 40s, when it was cheap entertainment that a family could play with one deck, and Hollywood studios famously played it between takes. Its two-player sprint form, Gin Rummy, invented around 1909, became the celebrity game of that era and eventually got its own page here.

The objective

Get rid of every card in your hand by forming melds — sets and runs — laid face up on the table. The first player to empty their hand goes out and wins the hand, collecting points for every card still stuck in the other players' hands. Hands repeat until someone reaches 100 points, winning the game.

Setup

  • Standard 52-card deck, no jokers. Deal size depends on the table: 10 cards each with two players, 7 cards each with three or four (six each with five or six, if you're playing around a real table).
  • The rest of the deck goes face down in the middle as the stock. Its top card is flipped face up beside it to start the discard pile.
  • The player left of the dealer goes first; the deal rotates each hand.

Card values

Aces count 1, face cards count 10, and every other card counts its number. These values only matter for scoring — the cards caught in your hand when someone goes out are what you pay. Aces are low: A-2-3 is a run, Q-K-A is not.

A turn, start to finish

  1. Draw one card — either the top of the face-down stock (a mystery) or the top of the discard pile (a known card, but one everyone saw you take).
  2. Meld, if you want to. Lay down any number of valid melds from your hand, face up on the table:
    • A set (or "book"): three or four cards of the same rank — 9♠ 9♥ 9♦.
    • A run (or "sequence"): three or more cards of the same suit in consecutive order — 4♣ 5♣ 6♣.
  3. Lay off, if you can. Add single cards from your hand to any meld already on the table — yours or an opponent's. A fourth card completes a set; runs extend at either end. Laid-off cards stay put: melds on the table belong to the table.
  4. Discard one card face up onto the discard pile to end your turn. One exception: if you drew the top discard this turn, you can't throw that same card straight back — that's a wasted turn and the rules forbid it. You may also end your turn by melding or laying off your whole hand, in which case no discard is needed — you've gone out.

Going out — and going rummy

The hand ends the moment any player sheds their last card, whether by meld, lay off, or final discard. The winner collects the point value of every card still held by every other player; melds already on the table are safe and cost nothing. That's the engine of rummy strategy — melding early banks your cards, holding back risks paying for them.

There's a reward for the bold, though: if you go out in a single turn, melding your entire hand without ever having laid down a card earlier in the hand, you've gone rummy and the points you collect are doubled. It's rummy's version of shooting the moon — genuinely risky, because every turn you sit on a full hand of melds is a turn someone else might go out and catch the whole thing.

When the stock runs out

If the stock is exhausted, the discard pile is flipped over (not shuffled) to make a new stock and play continues. On this table that happens once per hand; if the refreshed stock also runs dry, the hand is blocked — it ends immediately and nobody scores. Blocked hands are rare with players who meld, but the rule keeps a stubborn table from circling forever.

Scoring reference

  • Going out: collect the pip value of all cards left in opponents' hands (ace 1, faces 10, others face value).
  • Going rummy (out in one turn, no earlier melds): collect double.
  • Blocked hand: stock ran out twice — no score, deal moves on.
  • Game: first player to reach 100 points wins.

Strategy that actually matters

  • The discard pile is a public confession. Every card you take from it tells the table what you're building: grab a 7 and everyone knows to sit on their 7s and the 6-8 of that suit. Draw from the stock when the upcard only might help; take the discard only when it completes something real. The bots on this table follow exactly that rule — watch what they take.
  • Feed the pile, not your neighbor. Before discarding, look at what the player on your left has been collecting. If they took a 10 two turns ago, your 10 is not a safe throw no matter how dead it feels in your hand. The safest discards are cards adjacent to nothing anyone has shown interest in.
  • Shed the expensive deadwood first. An unconnected King is 10 points of pure liability; an unconnected 2 costs almost nothing to hold. When two cards are equally useless to your melds, always throw the dearer one — losing hands are lost by the Q-K rattling around at the end.
  • Middle cards are worth more than their pips. A 6 can sit in runs 4-5-6 through 6-7-8 and a set of 6s; an ace fits exactly one run and one set. When choosing what to keep between fringe cards and middle cards, the middle cards have more ways to get lucky.
  • Meld early against melders, hold against hoarders. Banked melds can't be captured, and open melds give you places to lay off cheap cards later. But every meld you lay is also a lay-off target for opponents — and if you're confident nobody's close to going out, holding a finished meld keeps your hand flexible and preserves the chance to go rummy for double. Read the table before you choose a lane.
  • Count what's gone. With one deck there are exactly four of each rank. If two 9s are buried in melds and you hold the third, that set needs the single remaining 9 — often a reason to break up the pair and keep cards with live combinations instead.

Common variations

Rummy is really a family of house rules that mostly agree with each other. Before playing for stakes anywhere new, settle these:

  • Aces high — some tables allow Q-K-A as a run and charge 15 points (sometimes 11) for an ace caught in hand. This page plays aces strictly low and worth 1.
  • Round-the-corner rummy — runs may wrap K-A-2, with aces again costing 15 when caught. A bigger change than it sounds: every suit effectively becomes a circle.
  • Block rummy — the stock is never flipped: when it runs out, the hand simply ends and (in most tellings) each player pays for what they hold, lowest hand collecting the difference. Our once-flipped-then-blocked rule is the middle road.
  • Boathouse rummy — drawing from the discard pile obliges you to also take the stock's top card, and you may only go out on a discard. Hands swell; endings get dramatic.
  • 500 Rum (Pinochle Rummy) — you may take any card in the discard pile (taking everything above it too), melds score points for their maker as they're laid, and the game runs to 500. The bridge between straight rummy and Canasta.
  • Knock rummy — no melding during play at all: you knock when you think your deadwood is lowest, and hands are compared. Its refined two-player descendant is Gin Rummy, which has its own page and rules here.

Frequently asked questions

Can I rearrange melds already on the table?

No. In straight rummy a meld, once laid, is fixed — you can add to it by laying off, but never take from it or reshuffle its cards into different melds. (Games that allow rearranging the table, like Manipulation Rummy or Rummikub, are their own branch of the family.)

Why can't I discard the card I just picked up?

Because taking the top discard and putting it straight back is a do-nothing turn that only burns the pile for everyone else, so the rules disallow it. You may discard it on a later turn freely. (If it's somehow the only card left in your hand, throwing it is allowed — a turn has to be able to end.)

Can I lay off on other players' melds?

Yes — any meld on the table is fair game, on your turn. Your 4♣ fits their 5♣ 6♣ 7♣ run whether they like it or not. Laying off doesn't transfer ownership or points; it just gets the card out of your hand, which is the whole game.

Do I have to meld as soon as I can?

No. Melding is always optional, and holding a complete meld in hand is a real strategy — it hides information and keeps the double-scoring rummy available. The risk is exactly as advertised: if someone else goes out first, everything you were sitting on is counted against you, melds included.

What happens when the stock runs out?

The discard pile is turned face down to become the new stock, once per hand. If that stock empties too, the hand is blocked: no one scores and the next hand is dealt. Some households shuffle the flipped pile, some never flip at all (see block rummy above) — agree before you play.

How is this different from Gin Rummy?

Gin is a two-player descendant with one decisive change: nothing is melded during play. You draw and discard until your unmatched cards are cheap enough to knock, then both hands are revealed and compared. Straight rummy is the open, social, table-building version; gin is the tense, closed-hand duel. If you like this game at two players, gin is the sharpened version of exactly that.

What's the best number of players?

Two players with 10-card hands is the deepest game — big hands mean long runs and real card-counting. Four players is the liveliest: melds hit the table fast and lay-offs cascade. Three splits the difference. This table plays all of them; the 2P/3P/4P toggle above the board redeals accordingly.

Is the "rummy" double a standard rule?

It's one of the oldest and most common bonuses in the family — going out in one throw has been worth double in published rules for a century — but like everything in rummy it varies by household. If you learned without it, toggle it off in your head by simply never holding a full hand back; the base game is unchanged.