The History of Rummy

No one has traced rummy to an inventor or a founding date. The record starts with Conquian, named in an 1852 New Mexico law, and runs through American "rum" around 1910, Gin Rummy, Canasta, and a 1967 ruling by India's Supreme Court. Much of it rests on the card historian David Parlett and on R. F. Foster of Foster's Complete Hoyle, who do not always agree.

Origins: Conquian and the Chinese Theory

Parlett names Conquian as the oldest Western rummy game. A New Mexico Territory law passed in December 1851 and printed in Santa Fe in 1852 includes conquian in its list of permitted games, and Guillermo Prieto mentioned it in writing from Mexico City in 1857. The Standard Hoyle of New York had a "Coon Can" entry in 1887, and Foster's Complete Hoyle gave the first complete description in 1897, calling the game a favorite in Mexico and the bordering states, especially Texas.

Conquian played differently from modern rummy: a drawn card could not go into the hand but had to be melded at once or passed on, and winning took 11 melded cards.

The draw-and-discard idea may be older, and Chinese. Parlett traces it to Chinese card games of the early 19th century, perhaps the 18th, citing Khanhoo, which W. H. Wilkinson published through Goodall of London in 1891, and a reported game called Kon Khin, a name close to Coon Can. He suggests the idea reached Mexico with Chinese immigrants or by way of Macao, the Portuguese, or the Philippines. Parlett calls this the likelier source but offers it as speculation.

Two other proposed parents fall short. Mahjong grew out of Chinese card games in the mid-19th century, and its oldest surviving sets date from about 1870, which makes it a sibling of Conquian rather than a parent. John Scarne derived rummy and gin from Whiskey Poker, a theory Parlett calls highly implausible.

Where the Name Came From

The name surfaced around 1905, and its origin is unknown. "Rhum" and "rhummy" are on record by 1905, a New York Sun article (1910 according to Parlett, 1911 according to Foster) added rhumston, and Foster recorded rumtum among Cincinnati players in 1913.

One theory ties the word to the drink, by analogy with whisky poker; another points to the German card term Rum and the Dutch roem, linked to Ruhm, "glory." The British slang sense of "rum," meaning odd, is often repeated, but the only source cited for it is a popular book from 2021.

Conquian's name is no clearer: Foster derived it in 1913 from the Spanish con quien, "with whom," after calling that derivation very doubtful in 1897.

Rum Takes Off, 1905-1914

Rum went from a regional game to a transatlantic one in under a decade. Parlett dates the first description of Rum itself to 1905, a game now called knock rummy. Around 1908 or 1909, Foster writes, a full-pack version of cooncan for three or four players spread in the West as rum or rummy. The Sun piece of 1910 or 1911 called rum the leading game of the season.

English players took the game further, and by 1912 they played with two packs and two jokers, which counted as wild cards. The Bath Club printed rules for that version. Foster's Cooncan (Conquian): A Game of Cards also Called "Rum" followed from Stokes in 1913, and the 1914 edition of Foster's Complete Hoyle gave Rum a full entry, with rules for one pack and for two.

Gin Rummy

The Bakers did not invent knocking, since knock rummy was in print by 1905. Parlett, following the author Dale Armstrong, credits them with one likely rule: no player may lay down melds until they can go out with 10 points or fewer in unmatched cards. Parlett notes that a card maker's official rulebooks of 1913 and 1926 still listed the game as Gin Poker or Poker Gin.

Gin peaked in the 1940s, after Hollywood took it up in 1940-41, and Morehead and Mott-Smith call it the principal fad game of 1941 to 1946. In November 1947 Oswald Jacoby reported in the New York Times that a card makers' survey found as many people had learned gin during the Second World War as had learned pinochle, cribbage, poker, and bridge combined. Tonk, another American knock game, was a favorite of jazz musicians in the 1930s and 1940s.

Canasta and the Double-Deck Games

Canasta did not bring wild cards to rummy: English rum players used jokers as wild cards by 1912, and Parlett gives the name Kalookie to any two-pack rummy with jokers.

Canasta reached New York in 1949, when Josefina Artayeta de Viel introduced it at the Regency Club, and Life covered it on 19 December that year. By 1953 more than 30 canasta books had been published, and Newsweek compared the craze with Monopoly and Mah Jongg. It faded during the 1960s.

Contract Rummy, Kalooki, and Rummikub

Contract rummy, which sets required melds for each deal, dates from the 1930s in Parlett's account, under the influence of Contract Bridge; other accounts place it around 1940 in the United States. Shanghai and Liverpool rummy are forms of it, and Phase 10, from 1982, is a proprietary version.

Kalooki names two games: a contract rummy played in Jamaica and in Trinidad and Tobago, and a separate 13-card game, Kaluki, played in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Neither has a reliable date.

Rummikub moved the rummy idea onto tiles. Ephraim Hertzano (1912-1987), born in Romania, brought the tile game to Israel in 1950; his son Micha later said it was a Romanian game, not his father's invention. It became a bestseller in the United States in 1977 and won the Spiel des Jahres in 1980.

Indian Rummy and the 1967 Court Ruling

Indian Rummy, the 13-card game also called Paplu, has no sourced origin date. The law is better documented: on 22 November 1967 the Supreme Court decided State of Andhra Pradesh v. K. Satyanarayana (reported as AIR 1968 SC 825) and held that rummy is mainly and preponderantly a game of skill, with an element of chance comparable to bridge. The case concerned the Crescent Recreation Club in Secunderabad, raided in 1963 under the Hyderabad Gambling Act.

The ruling did not make playing for stakes legal in general. The Court said an offense could still be made out on other evidence of gambling, or if the club profited from rummy played for stakes. In 2012 the Madras High Court held club rummy for stakes to be gambling, and in 2015 the Supreme Court called pleas about online rummy premature and did not decide them. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, law since August 2025, bans online money games whether they turn on skill, chance, or both.

The Rummy on This Site

Our game is Basic Rummy, the modern single-deck form of what Foster's 1914 Hoyle called single-pack Rum. It uses one 52-card deck with no jokers, melds go face up on the table, and any player may lay off cards on any meld. You play against one to five computer opponents. Read the rummy rules for the deal and scoring, or play rummy now.