Gin Rummy

About this game

Gin Rummy is the two-handed card game the whole rummy family is named after, and it is really a game about one number. You hold ten cards; the ones you can arrange into runs and sets are safe, and everything left over is deadwood, counted at face value with the ace worth one and every court card worth ten. Each turn you take a card — the face-up one somebody just threw away, or a blind one off the stock — and throw one back. That is the entire mechanic, and out of it comes a genuinely tense game, because the moment your deadwood drops to ten or less you may knock and end the hand on the spot. Knocking is not automatically the right move. When you knock, both hands come face up, your opponent lays their own melds down and then gets to LAY OFF their leftovers onto yours — their spare six slides onto your three-four-five, their fourth king joins your set of three — and only what survives that counts against them. Knock at ten while they are sitting on four and they undercut you, taking the difference plus a twenty-point bonus that you paid for. The alternative is gin: hold out until nothing is left over at all, score the whole of their hand plus twenty, and allow them no lay-off whatsoever. Every deadwood figure in this version is exact rather than approximate, which matters more than it sounds. A card can be spent in a run or in a set but never both, so working out the cheapest arrangement of ten cards is a small optimisation problem, not a scan — and the obvious shortcut of grabbing the biggest meld first gets it wrong often enough to look like cheating. Your hand fans itself into the arrangement the solver found, one colour per meld, with the point value printed over every loose card, so you can always see exactly what a knock would cost you. The computer plays a straight game with no peeking. It takes the discard only when doing so genuinely lowers its count, it holds low cards and near-melds rather than blindly dumping the biggest number, and it will not throw a card its own melds need — so what it discards tells you something true, and counting those discards is real information rather than noise. Hands run until somebody reaches a hundred, and if the stock ever runs down to two cards the hand is a wash and the deal passes.

Controls

Tap the pile you want to draw from, then tap the card you want to throw.

Touch

• Tap the stock or the discard pile to draw.
• Tap a card once to raise it, then tap it again — or press Discard — to throw it.
• Press Knock when it lights up; it reads Gin instead when the discard leaves you with nothing.

Keyboard

• S draws from the stock and D takes the discard.
• Left and Right walk along your fanned hand.
• Enter throws the raised card, K knocks with it, and N moves on after a hand.

How to play

Ten cards each, and the goal is to get your leftovers down to ten points or fewer.

Your turn

• Take the top card of the stock, or take the face-up card your opponent just discarded.
• Then throw one card away. You always end a turn holding ten.

Melds and deadwood

• A RUN is three or more cards in sequence in one suit; a SET is three or four of the same rank.
• Any card not in a meld is deadwood, counted at face value — ace one, number cards their number, jack, queen and king ten each.
• A card can be used in a run or in a set, never in both.

Ending the hand

• Knock as you discard, but only when the ten cards left would total ten deadwood or less.
• Your opponent then lays off their own leftovers onto your melds, and you score the difference between the two counts.
• Zero deadwood is GIN: score the difference plus twenty, and they may lay nothing off.
• If their count comes out equal or lower they UNDERCUT you and score the difference plus twenty instead.
• First past 100 points wins the game.

Read the full Gin Rummy rules and strategy →