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How to Play Kon Khan
The card game of Iraqi, Chaldean & Assyrian family gatherings — spelled Kon Khan, Koncan, or كونكان. Also on this page in العربية.
What Kon Khan is
Kon Khan is the card game of Iraqi, Chaldean and Assyrian family gatherings. If you grew up in one of these families, you already know the sound of it — cards on a table, someone arguing about a meld, a game that somehow runs until 2am.
It belongs to the rummy family and is a close relative of Conquian, the old Mexican game that most rummy variants descend from. But the version played across the Middle East and its diaspora has its own rules — the 51-point open, the motune pot, burning a set of four — and those have never been properly written down in English anywhere. This page is our attempt to fix that.
What you need
- Players: 2 to 5
- Cards: two standard 52-card decks plus 2 jokers — 106 cards total
- The deal: 14 cards to each player. The opener gets 15 and starts the discard pile. The opener rotates each hand.
The goal
Get rid of all your cards. A hand ends the moment one player empties their hand — that player has "gone out." To start laying cards down you first have to open, and opening in Kon Khan is harder than in most rummy games. That's the heart of it.
Melds — what counts
Sets — 3 or 4 cards of the same rank, in different suits. Because there are two decks in play, this matters: two identical cards (say two ♥7s) can never sit in the same set.
Runs — 3 or more consecutive cards in the same suit. They can be arranged ascending or descending.
Card values
The ace is always worth 10 — high, low, or sitting in a set. This trips up people coming from other rummy games.
| Cards | Value |
|---|---|
| Ace | 10 (always) |
| King, Queen, Jack | 10 |
| Number cards | Face value |
Worked examples: three aces = 30. Q-K-A = 30. But A-2-3 = 15 (10 + 2 + 3).
Opening — the 51-point rule
Your opening melds must total at least 51 points, built entirely from your own hand.
That last part is what makes Kon Khan Kon Khan. You cannot reach 51 by borrowing from the table or leaning on the discard pile. It has to be yours. Until you're down, the cards on the table may as well not exist — you can't touch them.
How a turn works
Drawing. Normally you draw from the deck. You may take the top discard only if you go down with it that same turn — that is, only if it completes your 51-point open. If you pick it up and then can't go down, you put it back and draw from the deck instead. Once you're down, that restriction lifts and you can take the discard freely.
After you're down, the game opens up. You can lay additional melds, lay off single cards onto any meld already on the table (including other players'), and use and steal jokers.
Burning a four. When a set reaches four cards, it's burned — removed from the table entirely to free up space. This is one of the details that separates Kon Khan from generic rummy.
Jokers
- A joker is worth whatever card it represents. A joker standing in for an ace is worth 10.
- On an open run, the player chooses which end it plays. Put a joker on 10-J-Q and you decide whether it's the K or the 9.
- One player may hold and use both jokers.
- Stealing: once you're down, if you hold the real card a table joker is standing in for, you can swap your card in and take the joker for yourself.
Motune — the pot game
This is the mode most Chaldean families actually play. Everyone antes in at the start. Then, after each hand:
- losers who went down pay 1 into the pot
- losers who did not go down pay 2
The deck reshuffles, so it never runs out — the game just keeps going. Here's the rule that makes motune what it is: the winner only collects the pot by winning two hands back-to-back. Win once and the pot stays on the table and keeps growing. Play continues, hand after hand, everyone paying in, until somebody finally wins twice in a row and takes all of it.
Best of 5 — the points game
The alternative scoring mode. Here the hand ends when the deck runs out, and lowest cumulative score wins.
| Result | Score |
|---|---|
| Went out (won the hand) | −100 |
| Went down and out in the same turn — your whole hand at once | −200 |
| Went down but didn't win | + points left in your hand (jokers 25 each) |
| Never went down, deck ran out, nobody won | +100 |
| Never went down and somebody else went out | +200 |
House variations
Every family plays a little differently. Common points of disagreement: whether the ace can be low in a run, how high the ante starts in motune, whether jokers can be stolen at all, and whether a burned four counts toward anything at the end. If your family plays a rule we haven't listed, we'd genuinely like to hear it — this page is meant to be the accurate one.
Play Kon Khan online, free
Hookah Royale is a free online Kon Khan table. It plays right in your browser with nothing to download, and on iPhone and Android. Start a private table, send the code to the family group chat, and everyone's playing from wherever they are.