How to play Marriage

Everybody is dealt 21 cards from a shoe of three packs. You are sorting those 21 into combinations, and the first thing you want is three pure ones. Put them down together and you have shown, and showing is the only way to earn a look at the tiplu.

The tiplu is one card, pulled blind out of the stock the first time anybody at the table shows. It fixes the maal for the rest of the deal: which cards are wild, and which carry points. Until it turns over, nobody knows what their own hand is worth.

There are two ways to be paid. Your maal is exchanged with everybody at the table whether you finish or not, and the player who finishes collects a fixed payment from each opponent on top. A player who never shows, under the standard rule here, is paid nothing at all for their maal.

1. Shuffle three packs together, with the three putali (the printed jokers, one per pack) and the single master card. That is 160 cards.
2. Deal 21 cards to every player, one at a time round the table, beginning with the dealer's left-hand neighbour.
3. Turn one more card face up. That card starts the discard pile.
4. What is left is the stock. At a table of four that is 75 cards. Two players leave 117, three leave 96 and five leave 54.

No tiplu is chosen at the deal. The slot beside the stock stays empty until somebody shows, and in plenty of deals that is a dozen turns away. In some, nobody ever gets there.

In the first deal the last seat deals and the first seat plays. After that the deal moves one seat along each time, and the new dealer's left-hand neighbour starts.

Three shapes matter. A tunnela is three identical cards, the same rank and the same suit, which exists only because three packs are in play. A pure sequence is a run of three or more in one suit. A dublee is two identical cards.

A wild card can fill the hole in a run, and that run is a perfectly good meld when you come to finish. It is not pure, so it can never be one of the three you show with. The one exception is the master card, at a table that has turned that rule on, and it is off by default.

Three queens in three different suits are a set. Sets are useful and they are never one of the three, even with no wild card anywhere near them. That one catches nearly everybody out once.

An ace sits below the 2 or above the king, and never both in one run. Ace, 2, 3 of spades is a run. Queen, king, ace of spades is a run. King, ace, 2 is not. And a maal card is still an ordinary card of its own rank and suit, so 6, 7, 8 of hearts is a pure run even if the 7 of hearts turns out to be the tiplu.

Showing is putting three pure combinations down at once. Nine cards, in a single move, tunnelas or pure sequences or a mix of the two. The Show button lays down the arrangement the app found for you, and it builds them three cards at a time, even when you are holding a run of four.

The first player to show causes one card to be pulled at random out of the stock. That card is the tiplu. It is out of the deal for good, and it fixes the maal for everybody at the table. Anybody who shows later does not get a new one: they simply get to look at the one already turned over.

The other way to show is seven dublees, seven identical pairs, fourteen cards down in one go. It is on by default, and it changes how you have to finish.

By default you do not get to look at the tiplu the moment you show. You show, you throw a card, and then you look, so the discard that follows your show is chosen without knowing which of your cards carry points. The eye mark appears beside your name straight away, though, and you go on drawing and throwing every turn until somebody finishes.

Two moves belong to the moment before you have drawn a single card, and both are gone the instant you draw. They are the reason it is worth looking properly at your 21 cards before touching the stock.

The first is exposing a tunnela. If the deal handed you three identical cards, put them down. They count as one of the three combinations of your show, and a tunnela laid down straight from the deal pays 5 points on top of whatever its cards are worth. Fold those same three cards into a show instead and that 5 is gone. Exposing costs you neither your draw nor your turn, and the button lays down one tunnela per press, so two tunnelas means pressing it twice.

The second is showing a hand that already shows. If your 21 cards hold all three pure combinations, or seven dublees, you do not have to draw a card first, and you never did have to. Press Show, the cards go down, the tiplu is pulled out of the stock and turns face up, and you see the maal at once. Then you take your draw and the turn carries on as normal.

It is the only show that turns the tiplu over before you have drawn, and that is what makes it worth so much. Knowing the maal, you can look at the top of the pile and tell whether it is worth taking instead of guessing. The When you see the maal setting does not touch any of this: a hand dealt ready sees the maal the moment it goes down, whichever way the table has set that rule.

Three exposed tunnelas are a whole show on their own. Once the third is down, press Show: nothing further goes on the table, the tiplu comes out of the stock, your eye mark appears, and you still have not drawn a card. One warning, though. By default an exposed tunnela pays only if you go on to see the tiplu, so exposing one and stopping there is worth nothing.

Say the tiplu comes out as the 7 of hearts. Every other 7 of hearts in the shoe is a tiplu too and scores 3. The 8 of hearts, one rank up in the same suit, is the poplu, and the 6 of hearts, one rank down, is the jhiplu. Each of those is worth 2. The ranks run in a circle, so a tiplu of the king of hearts makes the ace of hearts its poplu and the queen its jhiplu.

The 7 of diamonds, the same rank in the other red suit, is the alter and scores 5. The two black 7s are jokers: wild, and worth nothing whatsoever. Holding a tiplu, a poplu and a jhiplu at once is a marriage, and that is worth 10 rather than the 3 plus 2 plus 2 those cards score apart. They need not be in one meld or even all in your hand. A poplu buried in a sequence you laid down at your show still makes the marriage.

The three putali and the one master card keep to themselves. They are wild from the deal and they score from the deal, 5 each for a putali and 10 for the master, without waiting for a tiplu and without your having shown. A deal that ends with nobody showing still pays for them.

Your maal is counted from your hand and from everything you have already laid down, together. Two of a kind is worth more than twice one: two tiplu are 7, two putali are 15 and three are 25. The biggest maal in the game is a tunnela of all three putali at 45, and that is paid only when the three were exposed before your first draw and you went on to see the tiplu.

Every maal card is wild, a second tiplu included. A wild card stands in for a card you are missing in the melds you lay down at the finish, and it goes on scoring its own points while it sits there. That is why throwing a putali away hurts even in a deal you go on to win: settlement prices the cards, not the outcome.