Card GamesHow to Play Hand & Foot Card Game

Hi. My name is Windy. And this is the card
game Hand and Foot. Hand and Foot is played between two to six players.

More than six
players gets unwieldy. The general rule for knowing how many cards you need is one deck
per player or you can get a canasta deck, which has about 144 cards and it should suffice.
It starts by everyone being dealt two hands of eleven cards each. The first hand is called
the hand and the second one is called the foot, because it's at the foot of the play
and the Hand is at the head of the play. This game is similar to canasta in that you are
trying to get rid of your cards by creating melds.

Melds are groupings of cards, between
three and seven cards, in a meld. Seven cards is a complete meld, which is called a book.
Once that's laid down, then it's complete. You can add on to it, but you can't use wild
cards. You have to add on to it only with the actual number that is in the meld.

So,
first you start your turn, you draw two cards and then you try to make as many melds as
you can. It's usually played in four rounds. Rounds have points. The first round is 50
points, which means that you can't lay down a meld unless it equals 50 points.

Your first
meld should be 50 points. In the second round, it should be 90. Third round is 120. Fourth
round is 150.

So, you get your cards and you place them down. Let's say I had more. I only
have three. And then at the end of my turn, once I can't make any more melds, I discard.
The next person gets to go, once he's seen that I've discarded.

There are wild cards.
Jokers are wild and so are deuces. These can be used to be made into any other kind of
card. So, I could just place this down and this would be a seven. Once I had a full book,
seven cards, then the book is closed and you put it down.

If the book is made clean, which
means that it was all naturals of that number, which here would be seven, the book is red.
So, you look through them and you put the red card on top. If it is a dirty meld, which
means that you have seven cards, but one or more of them is a wild card, that's a black
book. And then you put the black card where the black cards of the number in that book.
Put that on top. You can still play onto books that are closed, but you can only play onto
them if they are red, or clean.

You can't play onto them they're dirty. And you cannot
add wild cards onto completed books. However, uncompleted books can have wild cards added
onto them, or you can continue to add on in your play. Play goes on until everyone has
run out of cards.

First, you run through your hand. Once you've gotten rid of your hand,
if you've cleanly gotten rid of it, and they've all been separated nicely into books, you
can immediately pick up your foot and start sorting that into books and adding them on.
So, let's say I had a pile of eights here. I could add another eight or a queen here,
if I had a pile of queens. If you don't get rid of all of them, you're down to one card
in your hand, you can use that to discard at the end of your turn.

At the beginning
of your next turn, you'll pick up your foot. When one of the players runs out of cards,
out of their hand and out of their foot, they've gone out. But you can only go out once you've
exhausted your foot and you have at least one red and one black book in front of you
completed. Then, the points are counted.

Jokers wild are worth 50 points. Deuces wild are
worth is 20 points. Eight through king are worth ten points each. Three through seven
are worth five points each.

You get 1,000 points for every red book you have and 500
points for every black book that you have. Plus, 100 extra points if you were the first
out. And that's how you play Hand and Foot..