Robbers' rummy

Robbers' rummy is a card game for two or more players that is a variant of German Rummy and dates to the early twentieth century. Like other rummy games it is played with two standard 52-card French packs, here with two to six jokers added, and each player is dealt eleven to thirteen cards. What sets it apart is the liberty to rearrange the table: a player may not only lay cards off to existing melds but may take cards back out of melds already on the table and recombine them into new ones, so long as every card on the table still belongs to a valid meld of three or more cards when the turn ends. A meld is either a run of three or more cards of one suit or three or four cards of one rank in different suits. The game drops discarding and scoring entirely, and the first player to get rid of every card in hand by melding and laying off wins. The name reflects how ordinary rummy players regarded such rearranging as robbing the melds.