Play buraco online, free
Two decks, the morto and clean canastras. In your browser, with nothing to install. Buraco is the Brazilian branch of the canasta family, and this is the game itself, not a guide to it.
Before you sit down: the game still opens in Portuguese. The rules are the same and the table reads without much text, but we would rather say it now than after you arrive. English is written and waiting to be published.
It is not canasta, and the difference matters
Buraco and canasta are relatives. What separates them is that buraco melds sequences of the same suit, not only sets of equal rank, and that each side has a morto: a face-down hand of eleven cards that you pick up when you run out, so a hand you thought was over keeps going.
If you arrived looking for classic canasta, this is a different game and we would rather you knew before playing than after.
What a hand looks like
- The deal
- Two decks. At the default table that is 104 cards with no jokers, and the two is the wildcard; the variants dealt with jokers use 108. Eleven cards to each player either way, and two face-down mortos of eleven, one per side.
- Canastra, clean and dirty
- A meld of seven cards or more. Clean if it holds no wildcard, dirty if it does. Clean scores 200 and dirty scores 100, and that gap is most of the strategy.
- Going out
- Ending the hand. You need to have taken the morto and to hold a clean canastra. Running out of cards is not enough on its own, and some variants accept a dirty canastra where the default table does not.
What to expect
Tables of two or four, in pairs. No adverts during a hand. Free in the browser, nothing to install, no card asked for. There is an offline mode against the computer, and private tables with an invite code when you want to play with people you know.
New here? The full rules are in the buraco rules guide: the deal, the morto, the canastras and how a hand ends.