Rummy

Rummy is gin rummy for two, dealt on a chrome-edged formica table in a diner that never quite closes. Ten cards each, a stock and a discard pile, and one simple question every turn: does this card make your hand tidier than the one you throw away? Sets are three or four of a kind, runs are three or more in a row in one suit, aces are always low, and everything you cannot meld is deadwood weighing you down. The game reads your hand as you build it, shows the best arrangement it can find with a coloured bar under every meld and keeps the deadwood count live above your cards, so you always know exactly how close you are.

Knock when your deadwood drops to ten or less and lay the hand down. No deadwood at all is gin, worth twenty-five on top, and nobody gets to lay off against you. Eleven melded cards is big gin and worth thirty-one. Get it wrong and your opponent hangs their spare cards on your melds, and if they finish level or lower that is an undercut and the twenty-five goes to them instead. A guest-check scorecard keeps every hand, and the game runs to a hundred with the usual twenty-five a box and a hundred for the game — double it if the other side never scored. If you prefer the older game there is classic rummy in the settings: seven cards, melds laid face up on the table as you go, and a target of five hundred.

Across the booth sits one of three regulars, and you pick who. Gus fixes the jukebox and plays the odds, Dot is a waitress who counts cards the way she counts checks, and Buzz is a teenager who reads comics between turns. They pull faces when a card helps them and go quiet when it does not. Easy sheds its biggest cards and hopes, Normal remembers everything you have taken off the discard pile and stops feeding you, and Sharp counts its outs, holds the cards it thinks you need and picks its moment to knock. Drag cards along the bottom of the screen to arrange them, tap to pick one, press G to regroup by meld, H for a hint and U to take a discard back before the other side has drawn.