Players: 3-5 with 2 decks, 6-8 with 3 decks. I just liked the symmetry of 12 hands of increasing complexity going from 6 cards in the meld to 17. Because that hand required 17 cards to meld, I thought there should be a 16-card meld, so I created another bonus round. This requires making a perfect hand, meaning you go out on all the other players before they can meld. With 11 cards dealt, and 6 cards acquired in three buys. I settled on the sequence of 10 hands (rounds) based on the rules at Wikipedia and Bar Games 101.īut our family had one last hand that I’m adding as a bonus round. My goal was to blend how we used to play with the rules published on the internet to maximize the fun and challenge of the game.Įach hand or round requires a different combination of cards to make a meld, and I noticed that the complexity of each combination was related to the number of cards required to complete the meld. I made a crib sheet to help remember the requirements of each hand (see below).

As we played the game trying out different rules I decided to consolidate on one set of rules. There were several sites that gave slightly different rules, and they called the game Shanghai Rummy.

However, we couldn’t remember the exact rules so I looked them up on the internet. It’s a card game I first learned back in the 1960s. We recently decided to play Shanghai when my sister came to visit.

Rules for playing shanghai card game