Stack same-rank cards into seven-card canastas, grab the discard pile, and outscore your rival to 5000.
Each turn you draw from the stock or take the discard pile, then lay down melds of three or more cards of the same rank. A meld of seven cards is a canasta, and you need one before you can go out.
Most classic card games have no author. Canasta has two: it was devised in Montevideo in 1939 by the attorney Segundo Sánchez Santos and his bridge partner, the architect Alberto Serrato, who wanted something as absorbing as bridge but quicker to play.
They arrived at it by combining bridge with rummy and conquian, tested it on friends at their local club, and watched it travel. Through the 1940s it spread north through Chile, Peru, Brazil and Argentina, collecting variations as it went, and reached the United States in 1949 — introduced by Josefina Artayeta de Viel and marketed for a time as Argentine rummy.
The 1950s belonged to it. Card sets, trays and instruction books poured out; interest faded through the 1960s; leagues survive in parts of the United States to this day. The name probably comes from the tray — canasta, a basket — that sat in the middle of the table.
Canasta is an original free implementation of the classic meld-building card game in the rummy family. Play in your browser with no install required.