Of Anglo-Saxon origin, rummy is a card game that has been practiced in Italy for almost a century and which retains a great amount of entertainment and is still very popular in our country today.
Probably deriving originally from the American game Gin Rummy , rummy has several variations and its best known version is certainly the 40 scale .
To play rummy you need to have two decks of 52 French cards , in addition to the addition of 4 jokers , for a total of 108 cards. It is playable by two to seven players simultaneously.
Rules of the game
Once seated at the table, the dealer will have the task of distributing 10 cards for each player, starting from the right and placing the deck of cards in the center, from which the first card will turn over. The player who opens the game will be the one who first received the cards from the dealer, who will have the possibility to choose whether to use the card turned over from the deck or draw a new one. Then he will discard the card and so the game passes to the various participants, until the most skilled will be able to tie all the cards in his possession (arranging them on the table according to the scores that we will see later) thus winning the round.
At that point, the points corresponding to the cards left in the hands of the players who have not completed the discards will be counted. Following the rule of closing points, the points reflect the face value of the cards (so a 2 is worth two points, a 3 three points and so on), then it is customary to assign 10 points to the figures, 20 for the joker. For the ace only one point is awarded if alone and 11 if it is tied with other cards. Of course, whoever closes with all cards tied pays 0 points.
The points left in the hands of each player must be noted, and then started with a second round .
The aim of the game is to try to make the opponents exceed the sum of 101 points , even over several rounds .
The rummy rules are therefore not too difficult , but lend themselves to the creation of strategies and skills remains an important component in order to win the game.
The scores
Rummy scores are not overly complex and are divided into 4 main types.
The player ‘s ability, as mentioned, lies in combining the cards that are dealt by the dealer in the best possible way and to this end you can tie the cards in tris , quartets , straight , flush and rummy .
The tris is composed by putting together three cards of the same value (such as three 6) with the possibility to couple the same suit. In the game of rummy it is also possible to form three of a kind in sequence, respecting the same suit, (for example 4 ♠ 5 ♠ and 6 ♠ ).
The same rules also apply to quartets which differ from tris because they consist of four cards.
The straight is formed by putting together cards of the same suit but in progressive order, with a minimum of three cards.
The Color is formed when you manage to have all the cards of the same suit in your hand even in non-progressive order.
The Rummy is a scale consisting of all our cards in sequential order and of the same suit. Generally there is a rule that rummy (given its enormous difficulty in composing it before the others close the round) if performed, acts as a ” jackpot “: regardless of the opponent’s scores, in fact, whoever composes it will have won the entire game!