Official Canasta Strategy and Expert Play is an excellent compilation of canasta topics for both beginners and advanced players. Would you like to become a better canasta player? To go out (and thus to end the game) you should have 1 or 2 canastas among melds after melding all of your cards. Each turn begins by either drawing the top card from the deck or taking the whole of the discard pile if possible. Otherwise, it's a mixed canasta (300 points). If all of the cards in a meld are natural, it is called a natural canasta (500 points).

A meld of seven cards is called a canasta.

Wild cards (jokers and twos) can be used in melds.Įvery meld must contain at least two natural cards, the number of wild cards should not exceed the number of natural card and be less or equal to 3. The goal is to score points by melding cards - a meld will have three or more cards of the same rank. Canasta is played with two standard 52 card packs plus four jokers, 108 cards in all.

Play Canasta Canasta is a very popular card game of skill, played with 2 decks of cardsĬanasta Ladder Top Players Canasta Forum Rules Tips & StrategiesĪt you can play a 2-player canasta against other real players from all over the world.