All About 13 Card Indian Rummy

Author: Neha Agrawal

Whether you call it Thirteen Card Rummy or if you opt to call it Indian Rummy, these two names are essentially both the same variant of Rummy. However you choose to call the game, you should know that it differs slightly from the original version of Rummy that you are probably familiar with. In fact the two closest games that it can be compared with are Rummy 500 and Gin Rummy, both of which are variants themselves of the original game.

For the sake of argument, we are going to call the game Indian Rummy. Indian Rummy is played with at least two complete decks of cards, which may or may not contain jokers, depending on the predetermined rules of the game that you have set.

There are two kinds of melds that a player can make in Indian Rummy. Firstly, a player may meld a run. A run in Indian Rummy consists of at least three consecutive cards – however, they must absolutely be in the same suit. Alternatively a player may also meld a three or four of a kind, although these must be in varying suits and cannot contain two of the same card in the same suit; which is only possible due to the use of multiple decks, but does not count as a valid move.

Unlike standard Rummywhich requires the players to remove themselves of all of their cards, Indian Rummy requires the player to simply create two melds, one of which must be a pure meld; which means that it cannot contain any wild cards.

Wild cards will be represented by the joker cards; however an additional wild card will be available when one player draws a card at random from the stock pile of cards. The card that is drawn with then determines what the additional wild cards are to be. The additional wilds will then be cards of the same value (not necessarily colour), and the next highest card will be called a “puploo” which basically entitles the players to ten points from the other players at the end of the round if they are holding it. If they hold two of them, then the puploo points go up to twenty five from each player.

When it comes to scoring after the end of the game, Indian Rummy rules generally favour that the points total are rounded up or down to the nearest five points. Aside from these rules, the rules for Rummy are relatively familiar to the original game, though these additional rules could take some time learning if you are not familiar with them.