How to Play Rummy: Setup, Rules, and Scoring

Learning how to play rummy starts with one deck, a stock pile, and a simple goal: empty your hand before anyone else does by building sets and runs you can lay down on the table. This page covers basic rummy, the two-to-six-player card game most tables just call “rummy” or “straight rummy,” and calls out where 500 rummy and its closest relatives — the two-player-only gin rummy and the tile-based Rummikub — change the rules.

Rummy rules: how to play rummy in a nutshell

This hub describes basic (straight) rummy: a 52-card deck, hands sized to the number of players, sets and runs melded onto the table, unlimited laying off, and deadwood scored by pip value once someone goes out. Where 500 rummy or another named variant changes one of those rules, that change is flagged in its own section rather than folded in as if every table played it the same way.

Setup

Shuffle a single 52-card deck (two decks for five or six players) and deal cards one at a time, starting with the player to the dealer’s left. The hand size depends on how many are playing: two players get ten cards each, three or four players get seven cards each, and five or six players get six cards each. Stack the rest face down as the stock, then flip its top card face up beside it to start the discard pile.

The diagram below shows that layout — the dealt hand, the stock, and the discard pile — plus what a meld looks like once it’s down on the table.

Agree before dealing on two things that vary by group: whether you’re playing straight rummy for a single hand or keeping a running score across hands to a target, and whether the ace counts low only (the version this page describes) or can also play high at some tables.

How a turn works

On your turn, first draw: take either the top card of the stock, face down and unseen, or the top card of the discard pile, which is already known to everyone. After drawing, you may lay down any melds your hand supports. A set is three or four cards of the same rank (for example three 7s); a run is three or more consecutive cards of the same suit (for example 6-7-8 of hearts). You may also lay off — add one or more cards from your hand onto any meld already on the table, yours or an opponent’s, as long as the result is still a valid set or run. There’s no limit to how many cards you can lay off in a single turn. Finish your turn by discarding exactly one card face up onto the discard pile.

Melding and laying off are both optional every turn; discarding one card at the end is not. A player who draws, melds nothing, and simply discards is playing a perfectly normal turn — building a hand up before laying anything down is often the stronger plan early in a deal.

Scoring

A hand ends the moment a player goes out: melds, lays off, or discards their last card so their hand is empty. Every other player then totals the pip value of whatever is left in their own hand — face cards (king, queen, jack) count 10 each, the ace counts 1, and every other card counts its own number — and pays that amount to the winner, whether or not those leftover cards would have formed a valid meld.

Going rummy is the one exception worth planning around: if you go out in a single turn without having melded or laid off any cards earlier in that same hand, every opponent pays double their usual deadwood total instead of the normal amount. It rewards holding your hand close and springing it all at once, at the risk of being caught with a full hand of deadwood if someone else goes out first.

How the game ends

A single hand ends as soon as one player goes out, and that’s enough to call it a complete game if you’re only playing once. Most groups instead keep playing hand after hand, adding each hand’s pip-value payments to a running score, until one player’s cumulative total crosses an agreed target — 100 or 500 points are both common choices. Whoever is over the target when a hand ends is the loser (or, scored the other way at some tables, whoever has banked the most wins); agree which direction you’re counting before you start.

Common variations

500 Rummy changes two things at once: instead of drawing only the top card of the discard pile, you may reach deeper into it to take a card you can use, provided you immediately meld that card and take every card above it into your hand along with it. Scoring also flips — each player adds up the value of what they’ve melded and subtracts whatever is left in hand, with the net total added to a running cumulative score, rather than paying pip value to the winner alone.

Some tables cap laying off once a player is close to going out, or skip the going-rummy double entirely and use a flat bonus (commonly 10 points) instead. Others deal every player the same hand size regardless of headcount, which speeds up short games but changes the odds of an early meld.

If you’ve got exactly two players and want sharper, faster hands, gin rummy trims the table melds away entirely and replaces them with a knock-and-count finish. If your group likes the sets-and-runs structure but would rather pass tiles than cards, Rummikub translates the same core idea onto a tile rack with no cards at all. For other draw-and-discard card games worth keeping in the same drawer, see spades and euchre — both trick-taking rather than melding, but close enough in feel to round out a game night.