How to play Gin Rummy

The goal

Melds and deadwood

• A meld is a set (three or four cards of one rank) or a run (three or more in a row of one suit, Ace low: A-2-3, never Q-K-A).
• Cards that aren’t in a meld are deadwood. Aces count 1, number cards their value, J, Q and K count 10.
• Your hand sorts itself into its best melds, underlined, with the deadwood on the right. Drag cards to arrange them yourself; Sort puts them back.

Each turn

• At the start of a hand the upcard is offered to the non-dealer, then the dealer. If both pass, the non-dealer draws from the stock.
• Draw one card, from the stock or the top of the discard pile, then discard one.
• You can’t throw back the 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 no one scores.

Knocking and gin

• With 10 or less deadwood after your discard you can knock. Knock shows how much deadwood you’ll have; it throws the card you picked, or your best discard.
• Gin is knocking with no deadwood at all.
• When someone knocks, the other player lays off what they can on the knocker’s melds: extending runs or adding the fourth card to a set. There are no layoffs after gin.

Scoring

• Knock: you score the difference between the two deadwood counts.
• Gin: 25 plus the other player’s deadwood.
• Undercut: if the defender’s deadwood is the same or lower than the knocker’s, the defender scores the difference plus 25.
• First to 100 ends the game. Then each player adds 25 for every hand they won (box bonus) and the winner adds 100 (game bonus), or 200 if the loser scored nothing.
• The loser of each hand deals the next.

Levels

• Easy makes careless discards and waits for a low count before knocking.
• Normal keeps its deadwood low, avoids feeding you obvious cards and knocks as soon as it can.
• Hard also tracks what you pick up and throw away, keeps the cards with the most ways to improve and grabs cheap cards to cut its count.
• Undo takes back your last move and the computer’s reply, within the current hand.

Questions

Strategy guides