Fifteen cards each, two drawn every turn, and a discard pile that is worth more than your hand. Canasta is really a long argument about whether you can afford to take that pile.
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You each hold fifteen cards, draw two at the start of every turn and discard one at the end. You build melds of three or more of a rank, and a meld of seven is a canasta, which is what the game is actually named after and what you need two of before you may go out.
Red threes are bonuses you set aside. Black threes stop the pile being taken. Jokers and twos are wild and they are also what freezes everything.
| Cards dealt to each player | 15 |
|---|---|
| Cards drawn per turn | 2 |
| Canastas needed to go out | 2 |
| Target score | 5,000 |
Everything interesting in Canasta is about whether you can take the pile and what it will cost you, because taking it means taking all of it. It is frozen by a wild card or a red three, blocked for a turn by a black three, and how much you need on the table before you may meld at all rises as your score does.
These freeze rules are precisely where implementations quietly drift from the rules they claim to follow. Ours are each a named setting with a named test, so the behaviour cannot drift without something failing.
Two-handed first, and on purpose. The loudest complaint across this whole category is the computer partner who hands the game away. Shipping a partnership version with a weak partner would walk straight into that. Two-handed Canasta is a real documented game, it exercises every rule that matters, and the four-player version can arrive when the partner is good enough to defend rather than as a compromise.
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