Gin Rummy is a two-player card game of building melds and getting rid of loose cards. You play against the computer: draw, discard, and knock when your leftover cards are low enough, or go gin with none at all.
Melds and deadwood
Each player has 10 cards. A meld is a set of three or four cards of the same rank, or a run of three or more cards in a row of one suit. Aces are low, so A-2-3 is a run but Q-K-A is not.
Cards that are not in a meld are deadwood. Aces count 1, number cards count their value, and jacks, queens and kings count 10. Your hand sorts itself into its best melds, with the melded cards underlined and the deadwood on the right. You can also drag cards into your own order.
A turn
At the start of a hand the face-up card is offered to the non-dealer, then the dealer. If both pass, the non-dealer draws from the stock.
On your turn, draw the top card of the stock or the discard pile, then discard one card.
You cannot throw back a card you just took from the discard pile.
Tap a card to pick it, then tap it again or drag it to the pile to discard.
If only two cards are left in the stock after a discard and nobody knocked, the hand is dead and nobody scores.
Knocking, gin and layoffs
When your deadwood after discarding is 10 or less, you can knock to end the hand. Knocking with no deadwood at all is gin.
After a knock, the other player lays off any cards that fit the knocker’s melds, such as extending a run or adding the fourth card to a set. Nothing can be laid off after gin.
Scoring
Knock: the knocker scores the difference between the two deadwood counts.
Gin: 25 points plus the other player’s deadwood.
Undercut: if the defender’s deadwood is equal to or lower than the knocker’s, the defender scores the difference plus 25.
The first player to reach 100 points wins. Each player then adds 25 for every hand they won, and the winner adds a 100-point game bonus, or 200 if the loser scored nothing.
The loser of each hand deals the next one.
Tips against the computer
Get rid of high deadwood, such as face cards you are not using, early in the hand.
Watch what the computer picks up from the discard pile and avoid throwing cards next to it in rank or of the same rank.
Knocking early often beats waiting for gin, but late in a hand a low count by the computer makes an undercut more likely.
Easy is relaxed, Normal knocks as soon as it can, and Hard also reads your pickups and discards.