Hand and Foot rules: how to play this Canasta-family game

Hand and Foot is built for a bigger table than most rummy-family games, and the deck scales up to match. There's no single publisher-issued rulebook here, so the exact number of decks you'll see quoted shifts from source to source. The formula cited most consistently is one more deck than the number of players: three decks for two players, four for three, five for four, six for five, and seven for six. Groups that already own a fixed set of Hand and Foot decks, or that borrowed a printed rule sheet from a specific club, should follow whatever count that source specifies instead. Every deck used includes its jokers.

Once the decks are shuffled together, the dealer gives each player two separate 11-card stacks, one at a time. The first stack is the Hand, and a player can pick it up and sort it right away. The second stack is the Foot, and it stays face down and untouched until the Hand has been played out completely and melded. Some published rule sheets deal 13 cards to each stack instead of 11, so it's worth confirming which count a group is using before the first hand starts, especially if players learned the game from different relatives or different regions.

After dealing, the rest of the combined decks form the draw pile in the middle of the table, and the top card is turned over to start the discard pile, exactly the way a Canasta hand begins.

Playing out your hand

Play moves the same way it does in Canasta: on your turn, you draw either the top card of the stock or the entire discard pile (when the pile is available to take), then work on building melds before discarding one card face up to end your turn. Every card in your hand at this stage comes from the Hand stack only. The Foot stays sealed, out of sight, and out of play, until you've melded your entire Hand.

Opening your foot

Once your Hand is completely empty, either melded away or discarded down to nothing, you pick up your sealed Foot stack and keep playing without missing a beat. This is the single biggest structural difference from standard Canasta, and it's also why the game takes noticeably longer per round: everyone effectively plays two hands back to back, with the second one starting from a position where the table already has a full round of melds down.

Drawing, discarding and picking up the pile

Picking up the whole discard pile instead of a single stock card usually comes with the same kind of condition Canasta uses: you generally need to be able to use the top card immediately, either by laying it straight onto an existing meld or by combining it with cards already in your hand to form a new one. A pile that's been "frozen" by a wild card or a black three sitting on top typically can't be taken at all until it's unfrozen, the same restriction that governs a Canasta discard pile.

Going out

A player goes out by melding away everything in both the Hand and the Foot, leaving nothing to discard, or by discarding a single final card once both stacks are cleared. Depending on the house rules a table has agreed to, going out might require at least one completed seven-card meld first, so it's worth settling that detail before the first round if the group hasn't played together before.

Scoring in Hand and Foot layers two things together: bonus points for completed melds, and penalty points for whatever's still sitting in a player's Hand or Foot stacks when the round ends.

Cards left unmelded in a player's Hand or Foot when someone else goes out count against that player, scored at fixed values: jokers at 50 points, 2s and aces at 20, eight through king at 10, and three through seven at 5. Black threes left in hand are a small penalty, commonly 5 points each, while a red three still sitting in hand at round's end is a much steeper one, commonly cited around 500 points, since red threes are meant to be laid down for their bonus as soon as they're drawn rather than held onto. Given how much this table varies between published rule sheets, treat the figures here as the most widely cited convention rather than a fixed universal standard, and confirm scoring with your table before the first hand if it matters.

Individual play, with no partnerships at all, is common at smaller tables and doesn't change any of the melding or scoring rules above, it just removes the shared score between two players. Groups that find the full deck count unwieldy sometimes drop to a smaller number of combined decks for a faster, lower-stakes game, at the cost of running out of certain ranks more quickly during play.

Hand and Foot descends directly from Canasta, and every core mechanic, melding sets, building a seven-card canasta, natural versus mixed scoring tiers, traces straight back to it. But it's not just Canasta played with more decks. The defining structural change is the two-stack setup itself: a Canasta hand is one stack of cards played start to finish, while a Hand and Foot player works through two full stacks in sequence, with the second one sealed and invisible until the first is completely gone. That alone roughly doubles how long a round takes and changes the pacing of the whole game, since a player can be sitting on a strong Foot they haven't even seen yet while still grinding through a difficult Hand.

The other big difference is scale. Canasta uses two decks; Hand and Foot uses several more depending on the table size, which means far more copies of every card in circulation and canastas that come together faster once a few are already down. Scoring also branches in one notable way: Hand and Foot's all-wild canasta tier, worth 1,500 points, doesn't have a clean equivalent in standard Canasta's simpler natural-versus-mixed split.

If you already know Canasta well, the fastest way to think about Hand and Foot is "Canasta stretched across two sequential hands, with a bigger deck to match." A full breakdown of how Canasta scoring differs, including its regional variants and the 2-player game, sits on its own page, worth a look for anyone comparing the two games side by side.