Contract Rummy
Also known as Combination Rummy, Joker Rummy, Deuces Wild Rummy
- Players
- 3-8 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 2 standard decks with jokers for 3 or 4 players; 3 for 5 or 6; 4 for 7 or 8
- Time
- 60-120 minutes
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Category
- Rummy family
Setup
Contract Rummy is a rummy game with a syllabus. A full game is seven deals, and each one names in advance the exact combination you have to assemble before you are allowed to put a single card on the table. The requirement grows harder as the game goes on, opening at two sets and closing on three runs, so an early deal is a sprint and the last one is a slog.
Three to eight can play and four is the optimum. The pack grows with the table: two 52-card decks up to four players, three for five or six, four for seven or eight, jokers included throughout. One published arrangement instead keeps two decks whatever the size of the table and uses one joker fewer than there are players, so three people play with 106 cards and five with 108; either works, but count them out before you deal. The jokers are the wild cards, and a table that wants a looser game simply shuffles in more of them. Treat identical cards as interchangeable.
Draw for the first deal and pass it to the left afterwards, so with seven deals in a game everyone deals at least once at most player counts. The number of cards dealt is not the same throughout: ten each for the first three deals, twelve each for the last four, the step coming where the fourth contract begins asking for three combinations instead of two. Some accounts put the step one deal later and deal ten for the fourth as well, which makes that contract of three sets a good deal harder.
After dealing, stack what is left face down as the stock and turn one card up beside it to open the discard pile. The player to the dealer's left goes first.
A set is three cards of the same rank, suits ignored. A run is four cards of one suit in sequence. Aces work at either end — A-2-3-4 and J-Q-K-A are both fine — but they do not turn the corner, so K-A-2-3 is not a run. Everything else follows from that. Keep a running score across all seven deals; the pad matters more here than in most rummy games, because nobody wins a deal outright.
Play
A turn is draw, meld or lay off if you are entitled to, then discard — the ordinary rummy shape, with two large complications bolted on.
Drawing. Take whichever you prefer of the two cards on offer, the stock's top or the pile's, as usual.
Buying. This is where Contract Rummy stops resembling its relatives. A discard the player in turn does not want is not dead: anyone else at the table may speak up for it, and must do so before that player has drawn. What a buy costs is bulk. The buyer collects the card they asked for and a stock card charged on top of it as the price, which leaves them carrying more cards than anybody else, and none of it entitles them to act — no meld, no lay-off, no discard, since their own turn is still somewhere ahead of them. The interrupted turn simply picks up where it stopped, and the player whose turn it was draws off the stock. Where several people speak at once, seating decides: the claim belongs to whichever of them will be in turn soonest. The player in turn never buys; for them, taking the top discard is simply their draw. How often you may buy is the thing to settle first, because the base game does not ration it at all: you may take the discard out of turn as often as you like, the only bar being that the same player may not take two of them in succession. Relatives do ration it — Shanghai Rummy allows two a round and charges two stock cards rather than one — so it is worth asking which you are playing. Buying is the whole texture of the game. You will hold a hand that is one card short of the contract for six turns, watch that card land on the pile out of turn, and have to decide whether it is worth going a card deeper to get it.
Melding. Your first appearance on the table has to be the deal's contract, laid down complete in a single turn, and nothing more than the contract — no extra cards attached to the sets, no fifth card on a run. Until you have done that you may not put down anything at all, so a hand that is one card short of the contract is a hand with nothing on the table and everything counting against you. Laying the contract down is the whole of that turn's melding: nothing may be laid off, on your own melds or anybody else's, until your next turn comes round. Some accounts do let you lay off on the same turn you go down, which is a materially easier game, so agree it first. Where a contract asks for two runs they may share a suit, but they may not be contiguous: 3-4-5-6 and 7-8-9-10 of spades is one eight-card run wearing a disguise and never counts as two. They have to be genuinely apart or genuinely overlapping, so 3-4-5-6 with 8-9-10-J is fine and so is 3-4-5-6 with 5-6-7-8. The bar applies only within one player's own contract: your run may sit flush against somebody else's, and two of yours that were apart when you laid them may be closed up later by cards laid off.
Jokers stand in for any card, and a meld may hold more than one. Where a joker sits in a run, a player who holds the card it is standing for may swap the real card in and take the joker — but only if they have already melded their own contract on an earlier turn, and the joker they gain has to be laid off in that same turn rather than saved. A joker melded into a set is dead: it cannot be reclaimed by anybody, so the same wild card is worth much more in a run than in a set.
Laying off. Once your contract is down, later turns open up: you may add cards to any meld on the table, your own or anyone else's, and this is how you shed the rest of your hand. Nothing obliges you to lay off, but every card left in your hand at the end of the deal is a penalty, so there is rarely a reason to sit on one.
Discarding. Finish the turn by putting one card face up on the pile, which is the card the whole table is about to be offered.
Going out. The deal ends the moment somebody has no cards left. In the first six deals that means melding or laying off everything but one card and discarding it. The seventh deal is different: there is no final discard, so the whole hand has to go down at once in the three runs the contract asks for. Three runs of four is twelve cards and you will be holding at least thirteen, so in this deal alone a run may be longer than four — and one of them has to be.
Running out of stock. When the last stock card is drawn, lift the discard pile, leave its top card lying where it is, shuffle the rest and set them face down as a fresh stock, and play on. If that stock empties too and still nobody has gone out, the deal stops there and everybody counts their hand — in that deal nobody escapes with zero.
Goal & scoring
There is no winner of a deal, only a player who escapes it cheaply. When somebody goes out, everyone else counts what is still in their hand and takes it as penalty points, and the totals run cumulatively through all seven deals. Whoever has fewest points once the seventh deal is scored wins, and no standard rule breaks a tie — agree beforehand whether level players share it or play one more deal of the seventh contract to settle it. A player who goes out scores nothing for that deal, which is the best result available.
Cards count against you at these values:
- Each joker: 15
- Each ace: 15
- Each king, queen or jack: 10
- Every other card: its own pip value, so a nine costs nine and a two costs two
The joker is the figure to settle before the first deal, because published rule sets disagree: 15 is the common price, 20 and 25 both appear, and the higher the number the less willing anyone is to sit on one. Relatives of the game flatten the pip cards into bands instead — five for anything up to a seven, ten for an eight and above — which is a different game to hold a hand in, since under the pip rule a hand of low cards is genuinely cheap.
The pressure the scoring creates is specific to this game. In an ordinary rummy you can meld a set early and reduce your exposure straight away. Here you may not put down anything at all until you have the entire contract, so an unlucky deal is one in which you hold twelve scoring cards from beginning to end and pay for every one of them. Buying a card to complete the contract two turns sooner is often worth going a card heavier, because the alternative is being caught with the lot.
| Scores | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Deal 1 | Two sets | 10 cards dealt; 6 go down |
| Deal 2 | One set and one run | 10 cards dealt; 7 go down |
| Deal 3 | Two runs | 10 cards dealt; 8 go down, and the runs must not be contiguous |
| Deal 4 | Three sets | 12 cards dealt; 9 go down. Some accounts deal 10 here |
| Deal 5 | Two sets and one run | 12 cards dealt; 10 go down |
| Deal 6 | One set and two runs | 12 cards dealt; 11 go down, runs not contiguous |
| Deal 7 | Three runs | 12 cards dealt; the whole hand, no discard, one run over 4 |
Variants
Shanghai Rummy — The best-known relative, and near enough the same game. The same seven contracts, but eleven cards dealt every deal instead of ten and twelve, and four jokers in the two decks. Buying is capped at twice a deal and costs two stock cards rather than one. Two rules of its own: a run may hold only one joker, and aces are high only, so A-2-3-4 is not a run there. The wrinkle it is named for is the Shanghai itself — discard a card that fits a meld already on the table and you may call Shanghai as you do it, which protects it from being taken; fail to call, and anyone at all may claim it for that meld and make you draw blind from their hand in exchange.
Zioncheck — The 1930s American ancestor of the whole family, invented by Ruth Armson, and shorter than what grew out of it: six contracts rather than seven. It is more of a curiosity now than a game anybody organises an evening around, but the fixed-contract idea starts here, and everything else in this group is a tidied-up version of it.
Progressive and Liverpool Rummy — Two relatives that pull in opposite directions. Progressive Rummy keeps eleven cards a deal but runs to fifteen contracts rather than seven, climbing as far as five runs of three, with twos wild alongside the jokers and buying allowed only in the later deals — an evening's game rather than an hour's. Liverpool Rummy is Contract Rummy almost unchanged, with one flourish: the player to the dealer's right cuts before the deal, and cutting off exactly the number of cards the deal requires takes fifty points off their score.
Extra deals and house contracts — Tables routinely bolt on an eighth deal — four sets is the usual addition, pushing the three runs to the end — or rewrite the list outright, one published sequence running to ten contracts and asking for a run of ten along the way. Some also drop the final-deal rule that the whole hand must go down, letting the seventh deal finish with a discard like any other, which takes most of the sting out of it.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, GameRules.com, Official Game Rules, Denexa Games, The Rummy Rulebook, Gambiter.