How to Play Canasta

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Windy St. George and this is how to play Canasta. Canasta is played with a combination of three regular decks. It can be confusing so it's best to get a specialty Canasta deck. I'm using Canasta caliente but, I've taken out the specialty caliente rules. You can also get specialty just Canasta decks. Canasta points are divided amongst the cards, there's four of each number. The numbers go from two up to ten and then the face cards and the ace. The smaller ones seven and under are worth five points. Eight and up to king are worth ten points. Aces are worth twenty points. There's also specialty cards. There's extra one hundred bonus points that you can play. And then there's wild cards. There's two kinds, little wilds which are twenty points, big wilds which are fifty points. And there's special stock cards which we'll see how that works in a moment. Canasta is usually played with four players, in two teams, teams facing each other, partners facing each other. The dealer will deal out eleven cards and the point of Canasta is to make melds which are runs of numbers. You can't go sequentially, you can't do one, two, three. Everything has to be the same number. So you'll look through your card and have you'll try to get at least three of one number. You can use a wild card but you should not have more wild cards than you have natural cards. And the points are worth, they're marked. The smaller numbers are worth five points and the bigger numbers are worth ten points so you take your three and you put them down. So lets say you had three fours and you put them down and that's a meld. Later on you can add to it whenever you get fours you can add to it. Then there is a prize pile or discard pile. When you go through your hand you and your partner will decide which cards you want to lay down as a meld. When you're done making melds you can either draw a card and use it to make melds or you can take the prize card if it's available. At the end of your turn you will discard one of the cards in your hand and it goes into the kitty or prize pile. The special cards such as stop and bonus if it gets played into it, stop you from being able to take, to take the prize cards. So if someone plays stop card no one can take the top card until they've taken the stop into their hand. Then they may only take one card and only if they can make a natural meld with other cards in their hand. So to take the seven they would need at least two other sevens in their hand that they can immediately lay down. So you play continuous taking turns laying down melds trying to get the most that points you can. When you run through the deck you count up your points and see who wins, usually it's about five thousand points per hand, you play three hands per game. And that's how you play Canasta."