🃏 How to Play

🎯 Overview

Hand & Foot is a team card game where you race to meld cards into books before your opponents.

Players: 4 (2 teams of 2) or 6 (3 teams of 2)

Decks: 1 standard deck with jokers per player

Goal: Score the most points by completing books and going out

🃏 Setup

Each player is dealt two stacks of 11 cards. Looking at the bottom card, each player picks one stack to be their Hand (picked up first) and the other becomes their Foot (set aside face-down).

Players may only look at their Hand. The Foot is not picked up until the Hand is played out.

Remaining cards form the draw pile.

🔄 Turn Structure

1. Draw — Take 2 cards from the draw pile.

2. Set Down — Optionally set down your cards (groups of 3+ same-rank cards).

3. Add Cards — Add any playable cards to piles already set down.

4. Discard — End your turn by placing one card face-up on the discard pile.

🔒 First Set-Down Minimum

A team's first set-down of the round must meet a minimum point value based on the cards played (not including book bonuses):

Once your team has set down, you can add cards freely in future turns.

📚 Setting Down & Books

To set down you must have 3+ cards of the same rank. At least 2 must be natural (non-wild). Wilds can never outnumber naturals.

7 cards of the same rank becomes a Book:

✨ Special Cards

👣 The Foot

When you play the last card from your Hand, you immediately pick up your Foot and continue your turn.

Exception: if your last Hand card is discarded, pick up the Foot but your turn ends — play from it next turn.

🏁 Going Out

A player goes out by playing all cards in their Foot.

Your team must have at least 1 clean book and 1 dirty book to go out.

Going out earns a +100 bonus.

🏆 Scoring

+ Value of all cards that are set down (see table above)

+500 per clean book · +300 per dirty book

+100 for going out

+100 for picking within ±3 of the secret number at the start of the round (in real life this represents dealing the correct number of cards ±2 — e.g. 44 cards for 4 players)

− Value of cards still in hand/foot (counted against you)

🎉 Winning

Play multiple rounds. First team to reach 10,000 points wins! If both teams cross 10,000 in the same round, the higher score wins.