I’ll teach you to play Color Gin even if you don’t know how to play other Rummy variants or even other card games. Starting from scratch here.
It’s a two player card game, it uses a deck of 52 different cards. Four suits and thirteen ranks. The traditional deck for this game uses spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs as the suits and then A-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-J-Q-K as the ranks. If your deck comes with extra cards like jokers, ad cards, or scoring cards for other games, set all that aside, you won’t need them for this game. (They make good spares if you lose a card.)
J are called jacks, Q are called queens, and K are called kings. In this game for the purposes of building runs, the are like an 11, 12, and 13 card, but for scoring, they are all like 10. And the A is sometimes called “ace” and in this game it’s just a fancy number 1 card that’s not special in any way.
You also need a way to keep score. Each player has a separate score for each of the four suits, so I like to use pen and paper with eight columns.
A run means having at least three cards in order all of the same suit, like 8-9-10-J of clubs.
A set means having three or four cards of the same rank, like queen of hearts, queen of diamonds, and queen of spades, or having all of the threes.
Shuffle the deck without looking at the cards and give each player ten random cards. You can look at your own cards but not show each other yet.
The rest of the cards go in a face-down pile, but flip over the top card from there into a face-up pile. (The side of the card that has the suit and rank show is called the face side, even on number cards like the seven of hearts.)
To restate that, now you should have ten cards each in your hand, and between you one face-down deck of thirty-one cards (called the deck) and one face-up deck of only one card (called the discard pile).
The player who didn’t deal out the cards is going to be the starting player.
Your turn always starts with you choosing between either drawing the top card from the deck or picking the top card from the discard pile, and your turn ends with you placing a card from your hand face up on top of the discard pile.
Before starting the normal turns, the first turn is special; starting with the starting player, the players get an opportunity to get the starting discard card. If the starting player doesn’t want that card, the starting player must instead pass instead, and if the dealer then doesn’t want that discard card, they must pass back. This is only moment in the game where you may (and must) pass. If either player does take the discard pile card, play continues as normal (including them ending their turn with placing another card from their hand on the discard pile, as they must with any other turn).
You can never dig deeper in the discard pile, only get the top card; your choice between the top face up discard card or the top card in the draw deck.
You are allowed to try to remember what cards the other player has taken from the discard pile, and what cards are further down in the discard pile. Color Gin is a memory game in that regard.
If you are using Braille cards, you are allowed to examine the top card of the discard pile at any time, but not dig deeper.
Those cards are unavailable anyway, since even if players keep taking discard pile cards, they are also adding to that pile every turn.
After getting your new card for the turn, when you have eleven cards, and remembering that your turns always need to end with you discarding a card, that’s when you can go gin, but only once all ten other cards in your hand can fit into set and runs.
For example, you have a set in queens (hearts, spades and clubs), and you have a run of 10-J-Q in diamonds, and a run of 3-4-5-6 in diamonds.
The card you discard can be anything (it can be something that would’ve fit into the rest of the hand just fine, or it can be junk), but you need to discard one card. In other words, it can’t have been absolutely essential for the rest of hand to work together. (If you are familiar with Mahjong, this is the biggest difference. In mahjong you need to use all 14 tiles, in Gin Rummy you have to discard one of your eleven cards and make a hand out of ten cards.)
Also, each card can only be used for one thing. In the example, you would’ve wanted to use the queen of diamonds both in the sequence and to make that three-of-a-kind into a four-of-a-kind, but that’s not allowed.
If you go gin, I have to reveal my hand. I’ll try to fit my cards into sets and runs, because any left-over-cards (sometimes called “deadwood” cards) are going to be points for you! Jacks, queens and kings are all worth ten points each while the other cards are worth their rank (so a ten is worth ten, a four is worth four, and an ace is worth one). You also get twenty points for going gin.
In Color Gin, you play four games at the same time (which is why the score sheet has eight columns; two players times four games). Each game is associated with one of the four suits; clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades.
You get the points in the suits that are in each of your sets and isn’t otherwise in your hand.
For example if you have a run of clubs and you have a three-of-a-kind that’s missing spades, you get your points in hearts and diamonds. This is called “Going gin in hearts and diamonds”.
Or if you have a run of clubs and another run of hearts, and no sets, you get your points in spades and diamonds and it’s called “going gin in spades and diamonds”.
You can go gin in one or more suits. You are not allowed to go gin if you would go gin in no suits.
You gain the same amount of points in each of those suits, though. Over time, they will probably get out of sync, like if you go gin in hearts and diamonds first, and then go gin in spades and diamonds, you’ll have more points in diamonds than in either of the other two suits.
So in the example from earlier you have a set in queens (hearts, spades and clubs), and you have a run of 10-J-Q in diamonds, and a run of 3-4-5-6 in diamonds. That means going gin in hearts, spades, and clubs (but not diamonds for two reasons; they’re not in each set and they are otherwise in the hand, in the runs here).
If I’m stuck with two fives and an eight (as “deadwood” cards), that’s 18, and the 20 point gin bonus, you’ll get 38 points in clubs, hearts, and spades.
You don’t need to wait for gin! You can end sooner by knocking, but only when your own left-over card (“deadwood” card) points total ten or less.
There is a risk to knocking because, unlike when going Gin:
Regardless of who gets the points, look at the knocker’s hand to see which suits to score in. Deadwood cards counts as being in the hand for that purpose so if you have a run of spades, a run of clubs, and deadwood cards that include hearts and diamonds, for example, you wouldn’t have any suits left to score in so you’re not allowed to knock.
After recording those scores, shuffle the cards up and start a new round, alternating dealer and starting player.
Suits are only checked for that round; you can, for example, score in diamonds & spades one round, and diamonds & clubs & hearts the next.
Once anyone has a hundred points or more in a suit, no-one can score any more in that suit. It’s fine to have more than hundred, like if you have 90 and you get 40 in one round then you’ll have 130 obviously, but after that you can’t have more in that particular suit for the rest of the game.
That makes it harder to knock and go gin since aren’t allowed to do that if you won’t score any actual points.
Then when all four suits are closed, you win if your total score across all four suits is the highest.
If you do use variants, you need to agree on them ahead of the game.
Instead of playing to 100 in each suit, you can set another number. The 20 point gin bonus and the 10 point undercut bonus can also be changed.
Color Gin is appealing because it fully uses both dimensions of a card deck.
In the book A Gamut of Games, Sid Sackson created Color Gin as scoring tweak on Gin Rummy, as an alternative to (but pretty different from) the popular Hollywood Gin variant.
To play Hollywood Gin, forget the whole “one column per suit” thing, instead there are only three columns per player. Just like Color Gin, a column is over and won and closed when someone reaches a hundred points in that column. Your first batch of won points go in the first column, your second batch of won points go in the first two columns, and from then on your points go in all columns, except in closed ones of course. Win two out of three columns to win the game! Oh, and also the gin bonus is 25. Hollywood Gin is awesome but I like Color Gin better.
A common variant is allowing the eleventh card to be used in the hand and it sometimes even gives you more points if you do. I normally don’t use this “Big Gin” rule. In Mahjong you have to use the extra act, in Color Gin (as I play it) you are not allowed to use it, and Big Gin is more lax than either where you can choose whether to use it and you get more points if you do. Try it and see what you like but we usually don’t use it!