Hand and Foot Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

Hand and Foot is the American family version of Canasta, and the joke in the name is the point of it. Everybody is dealt two packets. You play the first one, your hand, and only when it is empty do you pick up the second one, your foot, and carry on. Teams build piles of seven matching cards and the round is only over when someone has cleared both packets.

Scoring is one net figure per team per round, so the rounds template is the right fit. Four rows, one per deal, and a running total down the side.

Setup

Use one full 52-card deck plus two jokers for every player, so five or six decks for a four-player game, shuffled together. Four or six players form partnerships; two or three play alone. Each player receives two packets of eleven cards, hand and foot, kept face down and separate. Turn one card to start the discard pile.

How to play

Draw two cards, meld if you can, discard one. You may instead take the top seven cards of the discard pile if you can use the top card straight away in a meld, subject to your group's pile rules. Melds are three or more cards of one rank, and a meld holding a wild card is dirty from then on. Wild cards are jokers and twos, and a dirty meld may hold at most two of them until it is complete.

When your hand runs out you pick up your foot and keep going. To end the round a player must empty the hand, empty the foot, and their team must already have the required piles finished. Red threes are laid out as soon as they are drawn.

Scoring

Each team gets one net number per round:

• Card points for everything melded on the table: joker 50, two 20, ace 20, king down to eight 10, seven down to four 5, black three 5.
• Plus 500 for each completed clean pile, meaning seven natural cards with no wild card in it.
• Plus 300 for each completed dirty pile, meaning seven cards including at least one wild.
• Plus 1500 for each completed wild pile, seven jokers and twos together.
• Plus 100 for going out.
• Plus 100 for each red three melded.
• Minus the card value of every card left in the hand and in the foot, using the same table, and minus 100 for each red three still held.

Card points for the cards inside a completed pile still count on top of the pile bonus. A team caught with a full untouched foot will comfortably finish a round below zero, which is normal and must be recorded as a negative.

The first time a team lays cards down in a round it must reach a card point minimum: 50 in round one, 90 in round two, 120 in round three and 150 in round four. Bonuses and red threes do not count toward that figure.

Ending the game

After the fourth round the totals are compared and the highest wins. Groups that prefer an open-ended game instead keep dealing, cycling the minimum meld, until a team passes an agreed total such as 10000.

Common variations

Some tables run three rounds or five. Wild piles are sometimes banned outright, sometimes capped at one per team. A common house rule requires a team to hold at least one clean and one dirty pile before going out, and another lets a player ask their partner for permission first.