Canasta

Canasta, variant of rummy, played with a pack made up of two regular 52-card decks and 4 jokers. In the United States it was, for a time, one of the most popular card games. Of Uruguayan or possibly Argentine origin, canasta apparently was devised to provide a common meeting ground between poker and rummy devotees. As in all rummy games, the grouping of cards into melds is the main feature of canasta; but, unlike other games of this family, its object is not to match up cards as quickly as possible, but to build up melds of 7 like cards, called canastas, because such cards have a high scoring value. In the two-handed games each player receives 15 cards, dealt one at a time alternately; in the partnership game hands of 11 cards are distributed in clockwise rotation. The remainder of the pack is placed face down in the center of the table to form a drawing stock, with the top card turned faceup alongside to begin a discard pile. If this top card is an ace, deuce, joker, or three, other cards must be turned until a card of any denomination from king to four appears.

Melds in canasta are restricted to sets of cards of the same denominations, and sequences are not played. Melds may start with three or four of a kind and may be added to as play progresses, players building always on their own and never on the melds of an opponent. However, melds must contain at least two natural cards and not more than three wild cards, which consist of the deuces and jokers. The bonus for “going out” by matching the hand completely is small compared to the premiums for establishing canastas.

The playing rules of canasta are more complicated than those of other rummy games. Like all rummy games, however, canasta lends itself to numerous variations.