

Five or more players should use three complete decks with six Jokers, whereas two player games should use two complete decks with four Jokers.Īll the deuces (twos) and jokers are "Wild Cards".Ī player "goes out concealed" when the player makes their team's initial meld and goes out legally in the same turn.
#Hand and foot canasta online free for one person plus#
Many rules are optional or have variants, so it is essential to agree on them before playing with people for the first time.Ĭanasta uses a pack made up of two or three complete decks of 52 cards plus four/six Jokers, depending on how many players are playing. There is some overlap between the major variants listed above for example, "Pennies from Heaven", which combines features of "Modern American" and "Hand and Foot".Ĭompetition rules for International Canasta * "Modern American", giving huge bonuses for canastas of sevens and aces.Within each of these four variants there are minor rule variations, typically named after Latin American locations ("Bolivia", "Cuban Canasta", "Mexican Canasta"). * "Hand and Foot", featuring "a foot", a second hand for each player which is picked up when the cards of the first one has been depleted. * "Classic", the traditional game described by the proposed Regency Club standard. Typically, these variants increase the number of cards used, make taking the discard pile more difficult, let players draw two cards each turn, add special melds to the game, and/or require more than one canasta to go out.Ĭurrently, there are four major variants: Many variants of Canasta were created in the latter half of the twentieth century. The game was very popular in the 1950s.Īlthough in the fifties there was an effort by Manhattan's Regency Club and the Association of the American Card Manufacturers to standardize the rules, there is a wide variety in the rules used. It then spread to Argentina, and then to the United States and the rest of the world. The game is named after the Spanish word for " basket."Ĭanasta was invented in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the early twentieth century. The most popular versions are the games for two and four players. The games for four and six players are team games, and if some other number of players participates, each player plays individually. There are variations of the game for two to six players, but the original version is played by four. Whereas in ordinary Rummy, the goal is to go out fast, and having cards in your hand is generally bad, the goal in Canasta is to build canastas, which requires many cards, and thus picking up the pile is usually advantageous to the player. These differences in rules produce differences in play. Another distinctive feature is that in Canasta, when a player picks up cards from the discard pile, the player picks up the entire pile, as opposed to only the top card in most other Rummy games (but see also 500 Rum). The distinctive feature of Canasta, as opposed to other Rummy games, is that making a seven-card meld, called a "canasta," gives the player a huge bonus, and the number of canastas made usually decides the game. Players = 4, in partnerships (variants exist for 2,3 and 6 players)Ĭard_rank = Ace (highest) K-8 (second-highest) 7-4 (lowest) 3 (special) 2, joker (wild)Ĭanasta is a matching card game in which the object is to create melds of cards of the same rank and then "go out" by playing or discarding all the cards in your hand. Image_caption = Card tray with a stock and a frozen discard pile.
