Player help

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Hand and Foot

October 2026 · By Ian

If someone has invited you to play Hand and Foot and you pictured a Twister mat, you’re not alone. Behind the odd name is a warm, social, wonderfully chaotic rummy game, a cousin of Canasta, that has filled kitchen tables, cruise ship lounges and library meeting rooms for decades. This is everything you need to sit down at your first table with confidence.

There are as many versions of Hand and Foot as there are card schools playing it. What follows is how we play on this site. Other schools may differ, and that’s not wrong; that’s the game.

What you need

• Cards. One standard deck per player, plus one extra, jokers included. Four players means five decks.
• Players. Two is enough, and the game seats up to eight. We play singles by default, every player for themselves. With exactly four, you can pair up as partners if you like. It’s optional.
• Time and snacks. We play to 10,000 points, so plan for a proper evening, or a few shorter sessions.

Why it’s called Hand and Foot

Every player is dealt two piles of eleven cards. The first is your hand, the cards you play. The second is your foot, which waits face down. Once you have gone down and used up your hand, you pick up the foot and carry on. Eleven fresh cards and a second wind, just when the table thought you were nearly done.

The goal

You score by building melds, three or more cards of the same rank. Grow a meld to seven cards and you have a book. A clean book has no wild cards; a dirty book has some. (Some tables say red and black books, or canastas. Same idea.) Books are where the big points are.

A turn, step by step

1. Draw two from the stock. Or, if you can meld the top discard straight away, take the whole discard pile, a thrill and a danger at once.
2. Meld if you can and want to. Your first meld of the round, called going down, has to reach a minimum: we open at 90 points, rising to 120 once your total is over 3,000. Many tables use a different ladder, so ask.
3. Discard one card to end your turn. Choose carefully, because it might be exactly what the next player needs.

The cards that matter most

• Wild cards (jokers and 2s). They stand in for naturals in a set, up to half the cards in a meld here. Precious.
• Black 3s. The blockers. A black 3 on top of the discard pile means nobody can take the pile. They score 0, so they never hurt you at round end.
• Red 3s. The house-divider. Some schools treat them as bonus cards, others only as a penalty if you’re caught holding them. On this site the host picks at create-game.

Going out

You can’t just dump your cards and declare victory. To go out you need at least one clean book and one dirty book, and then a last discard. Going out earns a 100-point bonus, and everything left in other players’ hands and feet counts against them. Timing that moment is half the game; see When to Go Out.

Scoring in thirty seconds

• Clean book 500 · dirty book 300 · going out 100
• Jokers 50 · Aces and 2s 20 · 8 to King 10 · 4 to 7 are 5 · black 3s 0
• Rounds continue until someone reaches 10,000.

Losers buy the next round of coffee. Unwritten, but respected. The full table, including the special wild-card books, is on the rules page.

One tip before your first hand

Don’t spend your wild cards opening melds. New players love slapping a joker down just to get on the board. Resist. Wilds are worth most late in the round, closing a book when that last natural card may never come. A wild in your hand is potential; a wild on the table too early is a gift to no one.

Already know Canasta? Here’s what changes in Hand and Foot.

This is a short version of a longer piece on our Substack. Read the full Absolute Beginner’s Guide on Substack.

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