Learn Canasta
The rummy classic of melds, red threes, and canastas, a partnership game that rewards patience and timing.
Canasta is coming to the app. The guides below are free to read now.
Canasta is a partnership game in the rummy family, played with two decks and four jokers by four people in fixed teams. You build melds, sets of cards of the same rank, and chase the seven-card meld that gives the game its name: a canasta.
It rewards patience. Most of the game is a running argument over one pile of cards in the middle of the table, and which team gets to claim it.
Start here
- How to Play Canasta: A Beginner’s Guide: the whole game, in the order it makes sense to learn it.
- How to Practice So It Sticks: why playing more is the slow way, and what to drill instead.
What the guide covers
- The 108-card deck, the deal, and what every card is worth
- Melding, and the two hard limits on wild cards
- Canastas: natural versus mixed, and why your side needs one before either partner can go out
- The minimum first meld, and why it rises as your score does
- Taking the discard pile, and freezing it against the other team
- Red threes, which pay 100 each and turn against you if you never make a meld
- Black threes, which stop the next player from taking the discard pile
- Going out, asking your partner’s permission, and how a hand is scored
Which Canasta?
There is more than one. The guide teaches Classic Canasta, the four-player partnership game the name usually means. Modern American Canasta and Hand and Foot are different games with different rules, and a group that plays one will not recognize the other. Ask before your first night.
Where it is played
Canasta had a boom in the 1950s and never entirely went away. It holds a steady following in the US, and a strong one in Australia and the UK, where club and community games are common.
Canasta in the Stoa Games app
Canasta is not in the app yet. American Mahjong is the game we teach in full today, both in the app and in the guides here. When Canasta arrives it will follow the same shape: lessons in a sensible order, then spaced-repetition drills that ask you to make the call and tell you why an answer was right.
Canasta lessons are not built yet.
American Mahjong is the game we teach in full today. The Canasta guides on this site are free to read now, and the drills follow when the app reaches it.