How to play May I?

What you need

• Two 52-card decks plus four jokers — 108 cards. Pagat scales this with the table (one deck with its jokers per two players); Sankki deals from two decks for every table size it supports.
• 3 to 6 players.
• Eleven cards each, in every one of the seven rounds.
• A score sheet. The lowest total after the last round wins, so this is a game about losing as little as possible.

The seven contracts

A set is three cards of the same rank, in any suits. A run is four or more consecutive cards of the same suit. You may not touch the table at all until you have laid down the whole contract in a single turn.

The last round is where May I? is gentlest. Its relatives make round seven a single all-or-nothing turn: the whole hand down at once, no final discard. Here you lay your three runs down like any other contract, keep playing, and still discard. Nothing forces you to finish in one move.

A turn

Draw one card, either the top of the stock or the top of the discard pile, and end your turn by discarding one card. In between you may lay down your contract if it is complete, and lay off onto combinations already on the table.

Laying off — adding a card to a combination on the table, yours or anyone else’s — only opens up after you have laid down your own contract. Until then the table is closed to you no matter how well your hand fits it.

The opening meld may be longer than the contract

This is the rule the game is worth learning for. If round three asks for two runs and you hold a run of six, you lay down all six cards. Where Contract Rummy would make you put down exactly four and hold the other two, May I? lets the whole thing go.

It changes how the round is played rather than just how it is scored: getting rid of more cards in the opening turn means fewer points left in your hand if someone else goes out first, so the safe play is often to open as long as you can rather than to keep a card back for a later lay-off.

Asking "May I?"

When a card you want is discarded out of turn, you ask for it. You take the discard plus one penalty card from the stock, both straight into your hand, and you do not get a turn — play continues with whoever was next in order.

If more than one player wants the same card, priority runs in turn order starting from the player whose turn it is, not from whoever spoke first. That is the opposite of the Finnish house rule, where the shout decides.

There is no cap: you may keep asking as long as you have not laid down your own contract. Once you have melded, buying is over for you — but other players melding does not stop you, which is a real difference from the Finnish game where the first meld closes the buying for everyone.

Whether the same player may take two discards in a row is a table setting. The written sources for May I? do not say, so Sankki allows it by default and lets you turn it off.

Jokers, and why you should not sit on one

A joker stands in for any card, and a laid joker is gone for good. Unlike Contract Rummy, nobody may put the real card in its place and take the joker back — not even the player who laid it, and not in a run. Once it is on the table it stays there as the card it represents.

A joker in your hand at the end of a round costs 25 points, the heaviest card in the game. Together those two rules make the joker a card you want to spend, not save: it is worth five aces in your hand and worth nothing at all once the round is over.

An ace is high or low in a run — A-2-3-4 or J-Q-K-A — but it does not wrap around, so Q-K-A-2 is not a run.

Scoring

The player who goes out scores nothing for that round. Everyone else counts what is still in hand: number cards at face value, jacks, queens and kings 10 each, an ace 15, a joker 25.

The round ends the moment the first player goes out — the others do not play on to empty their hands, they count what they are holding.

After seven rounds the lowest total wins. Rounds are not won or lost individually; a single expensive hand is what actually loses this game.

How it differs from the neighbouring games

• Contract Rummy makes the opening meld exactly the contract, lets a joker be reclaimed from a run by anyone who has already melded, and values a joker at 15 instead of 25.
• Shanghai Rummy, the American game, takes two penalty cards for a buy instead of one, caps buying at two or three per round, allows only one joker per meld and only a high ace, and adds the protect call.
• Finnish Shanghai gives the bought card to whoever shouts first, closes buying for everyone as soon as any player melds, adds an eighth round of four sets, and counts court cards individually — jack 11, queen 12, king 13, ace 14.
• Carioca, played in Chile, deals twelve cards, allows the ace to wrap around a corner, and permits only one wild card per combination.

Questions people actually ask