Chinchón is a matching card game

Card game

A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games...

 played in Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

, Uruguay

Uruguay

Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...

, Argentina

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

, Cape Verde

Cape Verde

The Republic of Cape Verde is an island country, spanning an archipelago of 10 islands located in the central Atlantic Ocean, 570 kilometres off the coast of Western Africa...

 and other places. It is a close variant of Gin Rummy

Gin rummy

Gin rummy, or simply gin, is a two-player card game created in 1909 by Elwood T. Baker and his son C. Graham Baker. According to John Scarne, Gin evolved from 18th-century Whiskey Poker and was created with the intention of being faster than standard rummy, but less spontaneous than knock...

 (possibly drawing the first part of its name from "gin"), with which it shares the same objective: making sets — groups or runs

Run (cards)

A run is a combination of playing cards where cards have consecutive rank values. Some games, such as cribbage, will specify that an Ace counts as one ; others will specify that an Ace counts above a King ; yet others, such as poker, allow an Ace to count high or low, but not both in the same...

 — of matching cards.

The name is spelled Txintxon in Basque

Basque language

Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...

 and in Cape Verdean creole (the latter also features the alternate spellings txin-txon, txintxom, tchimtchom, tchintchom or tchintchon). In Uruguay, the game is called Conga or La Conga.

Game rules

The game of Chinchón is played with a Spanish

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 40 or 48-card pack. The rules of the game are very similar to those of Gin Rummy, that is, seven cards are given to each player, and the remaining of the deck is laid in the table face down to form the stock. The top card of this pile is then turned face up and laid beside it to start the discard pile. The players look at and sort their cards, and then play by turns. Each turn consists of a draw and a discard:

• One card is taken from the top of either the stock (face down) pile or the discard (face up) pile, and added to the player's hand.
• The player can then try to make combinations in their hand with the new card. Each set in the hand must have at least 3 cards, and may be a group (cards of the same rank) or a run
  Run (cards)
  A run is a combination of playing cards where cards have consecutive rank values. Some games, such as cribbage, will specify that an Ace counts as one ; others will specify that an Ace counts above a King ; yet others, such as poker, allow an Ace to count high or low, but not both in the same...
  
  , that is, sequential cards of the same suit
  Suit (cards)
  In playing cards, a suit is one of several categories into which the cards of a deck are divided. Most often, each card bears one of several symbols showing to which suit it belongs; the suit may alternatively or in addition be indicated by the color printed on the card...
  
  .
• After that, one card must be discarded from the player's hand and placed on top of the discard pile face up, so that the player always has seven cards in their hand.

Once a player has enough sets, they may decide to meld their cards, laying off their hand on the table, and the round ends. That can be done when the player thinks that the value of their unmatched cards, called "deadwood" in Rummy, is less than that of the other players. Each of the players score penalty points equivalent to the sum of the face value of the unmatched cards left in their hand. If a player has no unmatched cards, that is, Gin, they earn a bonus of -10 points. A player automatically wins the game if they manage to make a sequence of seven cards, called chinchón.

When one of the players reaches 100 or more, the game ends, and the player with the lowest score wins.

Conga

In Uruguay, Conga ends when only one player remaining has less than 100 points, as all other players with more than 100 can "reenganche" with the player that has the highest score under 100. Also, players can only meld their cards if they have 5 or less points in their hand, unless their score is 96 or more, as melding requires staying in the game at 100 or less.