How to play Rummy
Called 10 patti (१० पत्ती) and रम्मी in Nepal. The thirteen-card game is 13 card rummy or Indian Rummy. Marriage is the other Nepali rummy, with 21 cards and three packs.
Rummy, as Nepal deals it, is ten cards each from two packs shuffled together, with one card cut to make a rank wild. On your turn you take a card from the stock or the pile and throw one away, until all ten sit in runs and sets with two runs among them, one free of jokers. Then you show, the deal ends, and everybody else is charged the cards they could not group.
On any of your turns, before you draw, you may drop out instead for 20, or 40 once you have taken a card. A table that deals thirteen, as India does, is a setting.
Set the table up with your own house rules
- Players
- 2 to 6
- What you need
- Two packs of 52 cards and two jokers
- How long
- Three deals, a few minutes each
At a glance
| Loose card, or how you finished | Charged |
|---|---|
| Two to ten | Its number |
| Jack, queen, king | 10 |
| Ace | 10 |
| Any joker | 0 |
| A hand with no clean run | 80, the full count |
| Drop before your first draw | 20 |
| Drop after it | 40 |
A show needs every card in a run or a set, with two runs among them and one free of jokers. The seat that shows is charged nothing, and no hand is charged more than 80.
The same table on one card, to keep on your phone or send to the family group. Tap to open it.Rules checked 20 October 2026. How these rules are written
What the game is
Rummy is a melding game where individual cards have no value until they are formed into groups: either a run of three or more in a single suit, or a set of three or four of the same rank. The core objective is to organise your hand into valid groups before anyone else.
On your turn you take one card and throw one away, so your hand is always ten cards at rest and eleven 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 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.
The deal
- Shuffle two packs of 52 together, with one printed joker from each. That is 106 cards.
- Deal ten cards to each player, one at a time, starting with the seat on the dealer's left. A table playing the thirteen-card game deals thirteen.
- 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every card has to come out exactly, with nothing over. Ten cards make three groups: two of three and one of four, or a run of four beside two sets of three. Working out which shape your hand is heading for is most of the skill.
Some tables, and most apps from India, deal thirteen cards instead, and the form here offers that too. Nothing else changes: the same packs, the same jokers, the same clean run, the same drops. Thirteen cards make four groups, three of three and one of four, or three with longer runs among them, so a hand starts further from a show and a deal runs longer.
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 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.
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 two sets and a joker-filled run is charged every card in it, exactly as if you had been holding ten 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 with every card in a group and 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.
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 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 hand out the way the rules read it, 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 ten 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 eleventh card away, lay the ten 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 reading a whole hand 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.
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 hand, 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.
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. A hand reads as groups or it does 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 the same number of 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 ten-card game, or thirteen at a table that deals thirteen. 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 last card and lay the rest of your hand 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.
How other families play it
Every family plays it a little differently. These are the ways we know of. The ones with a button are house rules this table can play.
Thirteen cards, as India deals
Some tables, and most apps from India, deal thirteen cards. A hand then makes four groups instead of three and starts further from a show. The settings have it.
One clean run is enough
Some tables let a hand show with a single clean run and every other card in any group. Deals end sooner and a hand full of sets is worth keeping. The settings have it.
Pool Rummy, to 101 or 201
Many home tables add the charges up instead and put out whoever reaches 101 or 201, and the last player in wins. The table here settles each deal between the players, and the Rummy scorekeeper keeps a pool game for real cards.
A full count of 60
Some tables charge 60 rather than 80 for a hand with no clean run. Dropping for 40 is then worth it far less often. The settings have it.
A wrong show costs the full count
At a real table a show that turns out not to be one costs 80. Here the Show button only appears when the hand really is a show, so there is no wrong show to make. The scorekeeper for real cards charges one.
Questions people ask
How many cards are dealt in Rummy in Nepal?
Ten each, from two packs shuffled together with two printed jokers, 106 cards in all. India deals thirteen, and the settings offer that too. Nothing else changes with the count.
What is a pure sequence in Rummy?
A run of three or more cards of one suit in order, with no joker standing in for a card. Every show needs one. A hand without one is charged every card it holds, up to the full count of 80.
Can a joker be used in a pure sequence?
Only as its own plain card. With the five of diamonds cut, three, four and five of diamonds is a pure run, because that five is used as itself. A printed joker has no rank of its own, so a run with one in it is never pure.
How many sequences do you need to show in Rummy?
Two at this table, at least one of them pure, with every other card in a run or a set. A setting lowers it to one pure run.
How much does a drop cost in Rummy?
20 before you have taken a card, and 40 after. You drop on your own turn, before you draw, and your hand is never shown. Against that, a hand with no pure run at the end costs 80.
How are points counted in Rummy?
Each card left out of a group costs its value: two to ten their number, and jack, queen, king and ace 10 each. Jokers cost nothing. No hand is charged more than the full count of 80, and the seat that shows is charged nothing.
Can an ace go after the king in Rummy?
Yes. Queen, king, ace is a run here, and so is ace, two, three. A run cannot go round the corner, so king, ace, two is not one. A setting keeps the ace at the bottom only.
What happens if the cut card is a joker?
Then the aces are wild for that deal. A printed joker has no rank of its own to make wild, so the ace takes its place.
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.