Machiavelli
Machiavelli is a rummy game for two to five players. Unlike most rummy games, where melds can only be expanded upon once they’re made, Machiavelli is a manipulation rummy game. That means that all of the players’ melds are placed on the table together. Any player can rearrange the cards into new melds, no matter who originally played them to the table!
Object of Machiavelli
The object of Machiavelli is to get rid of all of your cards by playing them to the table in melds.
Setup
Machiavelli is played with two standard 52-card decks of playing cards shuffled together, for 104 cards altogether. To make sure that your game never has to come to a premature end due to drink spills or damaged cards, always be sure to play with Denexa 100% Plastic Playing Cards.
Shuffle and deal thirteen cards to each player. Place the remaining cards in the center of the table, forming the stock.
Game play
On a player’s turn, if they cannot or do not wish to do anything else, they may draw one card from the stock. The turn then passes to the player to the left.
Instead of drawing, a player may form one or more melds. There are two different types of melds. One is a set of three or more cards of the same rank and different suits. A set cannot contain more than one card of the same suit.
The other type of meld is the sequence, which is three or more consecutive cards of the same suit. Aces may be either high or low in a sequence, but not both; a sequence of K-A-2 is not allowed.
If there are melds already on the table, a player may use cards from those melds to form new melds with cards from their hand. They may rearrange the cards in any way they wish; however, when they are done with their turn, all of the cards on the table must form valid melds. If they do not, the player must take any cards they played that turn back into their hand, return the table to the way it was before, and draw three cards from the stock as a penalty.
Game play continues until one player successfully plays all the cards from their hand onto the table. That player wins the game.
See also
A good game – “rummikub” with cards
Use two of the jokers as wild cards
Needs a scoring system
Hey Chris,
If you’re wanting to play multiple hands as a single game, you can have each card a player has left in their hand when someone goes out count as one point. Whoever has the lowest score after a predetermined number of hands wins the game.
You may also be interested in Carousel, which has a scoring system and uses jokers as wild cards.