How to play Rummy

Rummy is the thirteen-card game played all over Nepal, and the one most people mean when they just say rummy. Two packs are shuffled together, everybody gets thirteen cards, and one card is cut to say which rank is wild for the deal. You draw one card and throw one away, over and over, until your whole hand is arranged into runs and sets. Then you throw your fourteenth card and show, and everybody else pays what they were left holding.

Set a table up

Players: 2 to 6
What you need: Two packs of 52 cards and two jokers
How long: Three deals, a few minutes each

What the game is

Rummy is a melding game. Your thirteen cards are worth nothing to you as cards, only as groups: a run of three or more in one suit, or a set of three or four of one rank. The whole of playing it is turning a handful of odds and ends into four or five groups before somebody else does.

On your turn you take one card and throw one away, so your hand is always thirteen cards at rest and fourteen for a moment in the middle of your turn. Nothing is laid on the table as you go. Everything stays in your hand until the hand is finished, and then it all goes down at once.

One rule sits over everything else. At least one of your runs must be a real run of real cards, with no joker standing in for anything. A hand of thirteen cards in beautifully tidy groups, with no such run among them, is charged every single card it holds. That is why a good player will break up a set they have already finished.

The round ends when somebody shows. Everybody else counts the cards they never managed to group, and pays them. Or, on any turn of your own, you may drop out of the deal for a fixed charge instead, which is the one real decision this game hands you and the thing a good player is good at.

Four, five and six of hearts. A run of three in one suit, and no joker in it.

The deal

Shuffle two packs of 52 together, with one printed joker from each. That is 106 cards.
Deal thirteen cards to each player, one at a time, starting with the seat on the dealer's left.
Turn the next card face up beside the pack. That single card is the pile.
Cut one more card and leave it face up on its own. Every card of that rank, in all four suits, is wild for this deal. It is the joker, and it never comes back into play.
What is left of the pack is the stock, face down. The seat on the dealer's left plays first.

Two packs, so every card exists twice. You can be dealt two eights of hearts, and that matters: two copies of one card cannot go in the same set, because a set takes one card from each suit.

The seven of diamonds is cut, so all the sevens are wild for this deal, and so are the two printed jokers.

The cut card is the single most important thing on the table and everybody can see it. Eight cards of the shoe turn wild the moment it lands, and which eight decides whether your hand is two cards from finished or nowhere near it.

If the card cut happens to be a printed joker, the ace becomes the wild rank instead. That is the table's answer to a card with no rank of its own, and it is better than leaving the deal with two wild cards when every other deal has ten.

StockPile

The stock is face down. The pile starts with one card face up, which everybody can read before anybody has played.

Runs and sets

A run is three or more cards of one suit in consecutive order. Four, five, six of hearts is a run. So is five to eight of spades, and a run can be as long as you like.

Five, six, seven, eight of spades. A run of four, and one card longer than it needs to be.

The suit has to be the same all the way through. Consecutive cards in mixed suits are nothing at all, however tidy they look in your hand.

Not a run. The six is a heart and the other two are spades.

A set is three or four cards of one rank in different suits. Three nines is a set, four nines is a set, and four is as big as a set can be, because there are only four suits.

Not a set. Both nines of spades are the same card out of two different packs, and a set takes one card per suit.

That last one catches everybody once. Two packs means you will be dealt the same card twice often enough, and two copies of the nine of spades are not two different nines. They cannot sit in one set together. They can, of course, sit in two separate runs of spades.

Thirteen cards have to come out exactly, with nothing over. In practice that means four groups of three and one of four, or three groups of three with a longer run carrying the rest. Working out which shape your hand is heading for is most of the skill.

Three nines in three different suits. A set.

Jokers

There are ten wild cards in a deal: the two printed jokers, and all eight cards of the rank that was cut. Any of them can stand in for any card you are missing. A joker in a run fills the gap, and a joker in a set makes up the number.

A wild card left loose in your hand at the end is charged nothing at all. So a joker is never dead weight, and throwing one away is almost always a mistake.

Here is the part nobody expects. A card of the cut rank can also be used as its own plain self, and when it is, the run it sits in stays clean. With the five of diamonds cut, three, four and five of diamonds is a clean run of diamonds, even though that five is officially a joker.

The five of diamonds was cut, so it is wild. Used here as an ordinary five, it makes a clean run.

The printed jokers cannot do that, because they have no rank of their own. Three or more wild cards together count as a set of nothing, which is legal and comes up about once a year.

Five of hearts, a joker, seven of hearts. The joker is standing in for the six, so this is a run of three.

The run that has to be clean

One of your runs must contain no wild card at all. This is the rule the whole game is built on, and the one a new player breaks every time.

Without it, your groups buy you nothing. A hand holding three sets and a joker-filled run is charged all thirteen cards, exactly as if you had been holding thirteen strangers. With it, only the cards left over are charged.

It is also why you cannot show. A show is checked for the clean run before anything else, so a hand of thirteen cards in groups with no clean run among them is not a show, and the button does not appear.

So the first thing to do with a new hand is find two cards of one suit that sit next to each other, and then guard them. If you have none, you are a long way from home, and the section on dropping is about exactly that.

Ace, two, three of hearts. Three real cards of one suit, so this is the run that unlocks the rest of the hand.

A turn

Before you touch anything you may drop out of the deal, which ends your part in it for a fixed charge.
If you are staying in, take exactly one card. Either the top of the face-down stock, which nobody has seen, or the top card of the face-up pile, which everybody has.
Throw one card onto the pile. There is no passing and no keeping the extra card. If the thirteen cards you are left with are all in groups, you may show instead of simply throwing.

Taking from the pile is public. The whole table watches which card you lifted, and the bots write it down and stop throwing anything near it. Drawing blind from the stock tells nobody anything. That is half of what you are choosing between every turn.

The card you have just taken off the pile cannot go straight back this turn. A card drawn from the stock carries no such restriction.

If the stock runs out, everything under the pile's top card is shuffled into a new stock and the top card stays where it is. The cut joker is not part of that. It is not a card of the deal any more, only the deal's rule about which rank is wild.

At the table on this site a tap marks a card and a second tap throws it, and dragging a card at the pile throws it too. The Group button lays your thirteen cards out the way the rules read them, groups first and loose cards after, which is worth doing on every single turn. The strip above the buttons says what a show still needs from you.

Showing

When all thirteen of your cards are in groups, with a clean run among them and however many runs your table asks for, you may show. You throw your fourteenth card away, lay the thirteen out, and the deal is over.

Showing is not a gamble and there is nothing to weigh. The seat that shows is charged nothing and the deal ends there and then, so a hand that can show should show.

At a real table, declaring wrong costs you the full count, because you are counting thirteen cards by eye with people waiting. Here the rules have already checked the hand and the Show button only appears when it is genuinely a show, so there is no wrong declaration to make. That is the one place this table is kinder than the one it came from.

Which card you throw to show is yours to choose. Most ready hands can only go out by throwing one particular card, and the table lights it for you. Now and then a hand is ready two ways at once, and then the card you mark is the one that goes.

Ace, two, three of hearts and three nines. Two groups, six cards, and seven more to place.

Dropping out

On any of your own turns, before you draw, you may drop out of the deal. You pay a fixed charge, your hand is never counted and never shown, and the deal carries on without you.

It costs 20 if you drop before you have taken a single card all round, and 40 once you have. Against that, a hand with no clean run in it at the end is charged 80. So the arithmetic is plain: a hand that is never going to find a clean run is worth 20 to walk away from and 80 to sit on.

That is the whole decision this game gives you, and it comes round once a deal. Look at your thirteen cards, find the nearest two cards of one suit that touch, and count how far off a clean run you really are. Two cards short with no joker in sight is a hand to leave.

If everybody but one seat drops, that seat takes the deal without showing anything, and collects what the others paid. Dropping when only one opponent is left is therefore handing them the round, and it is still sometimes right. Forty now against eighty later is forty saved.

What the cards are worth

Only the cards you fail to group are ever charged, and each one costs its face value. Two to ten are worth their own number. A jack, a queen and a king are ten each. An ace is ten as well.

The ace being ten is the difference between this game's arithmetic and Dhumbal's, where an ace is the best card you can hold. Here it is a ten that happens to be able to start a run, so an ace you cannot use is as expensive as a king.

Wild cards are charged nothing, printed jokers and cut-rank cards alike. Nothing is ever charged more than the full count either, which is 80 as standard, so the worst hand at the table and a hand with no clean run cost exactly the same.

An ace is ten here, not one. So are the ten, the jack, the queen and the king.

Keeping score

At the show, the seat that went out is charged nothing. Everybody else is charged the cards they were left holding that are in no group, added up. A seat that dropped out is charged its drop, 20 or 40, and never turns its hand over.

Then the two rules that surprise people. A hand with no clean run is charged every card it holds, groups included, because without a clean run the groups do not count for anything. And nothing is ever charged more than the full count, so 80 is the worst any single deal can cost you.

Four seats, one shows. The other three are left holding 14, 41, and a hand with no clean run worth 52. The charges are 0, 14, 41 and 80, because the last one is capped.

Those charges are then settled. The winner collects everything the others were charged and everybody else pays what they were charged, so the Paid row always adds up to nothing. In the example the winner collects 135 and the other three pay 14, 41 and 80.

The running Total is the match score and it is the right way up. Higher is better, a positive score is printed with a plus in front of it, and the whole table always sums to nothing. The match goes to the highest Total.

How a deal ends

There are three endings. Somebody shows, which is nearly all of them. Everybody but one seat drops, and that seat takes it. Or the deal runs out of turns, which is the safety net and not something you will see often.

That last one is real rather than a formality. The limit is 250 turns in one deal, counted across the whole table, and the pile keeps going back under as a fresh stock, so a very cautious table could in principle circle for ever. When the limit fires, every hand still in the deal is shown as it stands, the cheapest one takes it, and nobody is penalised beyond their own cards.

A match is three deals as standard. Between them the score sheet waits for Next round, so nothing moves on until you have finished reading it.

Things worth knowing

Find your clean run first and everything else second. Two touching cards of one suit are the most valuable thing in a new hand, and a pair of them is worth more than a finished set.
Never throw a joker. It is charged nothing, it fills whichever gap you end up with, and the one you throw is the one somebody else needed.
Press Group on every turn. Thirteen cards read as groups or they do not read at all, and the strip above the buttons is doing the counting the rules will do at the show.
Drop early or not at all. Twenty before your first draw is cheap, forty afterwards is not, and by then you have usually talked yourself into staying.
Watch what people take off the pile. A seat that lifted the seven of diamonds wants diamonds around it or more sevens, and throwing into that is how a won deal gets given away.
Throw high cards early, while it is still free to. An unattached king costs ten and an unattached three costs three, and early on you have no idea which of them you will need.
Do not expect the hand counts to tell you anything. Everybody holds thirteen cards until the moment somebody shows, which is exactly what makes this game quieter and harder to read than Dhumbal.

The settings

Every table plays it a little differently, so the game's own page lets you set yours up before you start. These are the ones that change the game rather than the speed of it.

Setting	Standard	What it changes
Players	4	Seats at the table. More seats means more hands racing you and a deal that ends sooner, so a slow hand is worth dropping earlier.
Rounds	3	Deals in the match. The settlement runs across all of them without resetting.
Runs a show needs	Two, one of them clean	How many runs a show needs. At one clean run a deal is over quickly and a hand full of sets is worth keeping. At two, every hand needs a second run and deals run several turns longer.
Dropping	Allowed	Whether a seat may walk out of a deal for a fixed charge. Turn it off and a hopeless hand has to be played to the end, which takes the one real decision out of the game.
Cut joker	On	Whether a card is cut to make one rank wild. Off, and the only wild cards are the two printed jokers, which makes for a much harder and much slower game.
Printed jokers	On	Whether the two printed jokers are in the shoe. Off, and the shoe is 104 cards with eight wild instead of ten.
The ace in a run	Below the two and above the king	Whether queen, king, ace is a run as well as ace, two, three. Off, and an ace is only ever the bottom of a run, which quietly makes kings and queens harder to place.
No clean run costs	80	What a hand with no clean run is charged, and the ceiling on any hand. Bring it down to 60 and dropping for 40 stops being worth it nearly as often.
Difficulty	Medium	How well the bots read their own hands, how carefully they throw, and above all when they drop. An easy bot plays every hand to the end and keeps paying the full count for it, which is what a beginner at this game does.

The words

Rummy (रम्मी): The thirteen-card game. Marriage is also a rummy, with twenty-one cards and three packs, and the two are quite different to play.
Run, sequence (सिक्वेन्स): Three or more cards of one suit in consecutive order.
Clean run, pure sequence (सफा सिक्वेन्स): A run with no joker standing in for anything. Compulsory, and the rule the game is built on.
Set (सेट): Three or four cards of one rank in different suits. Never two copies of the same card.
Joker (जोकर): Any wild card: a printed joker, or any card of the rank that was cut. Charged nothing when left loose.
The cut card (काटेको जोकर): The one card turned face up on its own to name the wild rank for the deal. Out of play, and public to everybody.
Show, declare (शो): To throw your fourteenth card and lay the other thirteen down in groups, which ends the deal.
Drop (ड्रप): To walk out of a deal before drawing, for a fixed charge of 20 or 40 rather than whatever the hand would have cost.
Loose cards: Cards in no group at the show. What the hand is charged, unless there is no clean run, in which case everything is.
Full count: The 80 a hand with no clean run is charged, and the ceiling on any hand however bad.
Thupro (थुप्रो): The face-down stock, drawn blind.
Phaleko patti (फालेको पत्ती): The face-up pile. Only its top card can be taken, and everybody sees you take it.

Every rule on this page is the one the app plays by. Change any of them on the game's own page before you start.