How to play Contract Rummy

What you need

• Two 52-card decks plus one joker fewer than there are players — four players means 3 jokers and 107 cards.
• 3 to 5 players.
• Ten cards each in rounds 1 to 3, twelve cards each in rounds 4 to 7.
• A score sheet. The winner is the smallest total, not the most rounds won.

The seven contracts

A set is three cards of the same rank. A run is four or more consecutive cards of the same suit. The contract must go down in one turn, at exactly the required size — extra cards wait for a later turn.

In round 7 the runs may be longer than four cards, since the whole hand has to go down at once. Twelve cards will not divide into three runs of four and a discard.

A turn

Draw one card from the stock or take the top of the discard pile. Lay down your contract if it is complete, lay off onto combinations already on the table, then discard one card.

Laying off — adding a card to a combination on the table, yours or someone else’s — is only allowed after you have laid down your own contract. Before that the table is closed to you, which is what makes the early rounds a race.

The "May I?" buy

When someone discards a card you want out of turn, you may claim it. You take the card plus one penalty card from the stock, and you do not get a turn — the cards go into your hand and play continues with whoever was next.

If more than one player wants it, priority follows the turn order starting from the player whose turn it is. The same player may not take two discards in a row.

Contract Rummy has no cap on buying: you may keep buying as long as you have not laid down your own contract. That single difference is why a Contract Rummy hand can grow to twenty cards while a Shanghai Rummy hand cannot.

Jokers

A joker stands in for any card. A joker inside a run can be reclaimed: a player who has already laid down their contract may put the real card in its place and use the joker. A joker inside a set is dead — nobody gets it back.

An ace is high or low in a run (A-2-3-4 or J-Q-K-A) but never both at once: Q-K-A-2 is not a run.

Scoring

The player who goes out scores nothing. Everyone else counts what is left in their hand: number cards at face value, jacks, queens and kings 10, an ace 15, a joker 15.

A joker costs the same as an ace here, which is unusually mild — most relatives of this game make it 25 or 50, and that changes how long you dare to hold one.

Liverpool Rummy

Liverpool Rummy is the same game with one bonus: if the player to the dealer’s right draws exactly the number of cards needed for the deal, they score minus 50. Nothing else changes.

How it differs from the neighbouring games

• Shanghai Rummy takes two penalty cards instead of one, caps buying at two or three per round, and makes a joker cost 50.
• May I? scales the decks with the players (one deck per two players), lets the opening meld be longer than the contract requires, and never lets a laid joker be reclaimed.
• Finnish Shanghai deals eleven cards in every round, caps buying at three, and many groups add an eighth round of four sets.
• Carioca, played in Chile, has the same first seven contracts and then continues to four sets and a full ace-to-king suit.

Questions people actually ask