How to play Hearts

The rules exactly as High Card Club plays them.

Hearts is a game for four players, each on their own: there are no partners, no bidding and no trump. It is played backwards: points are bad. Every heart you take costs 1 point and the queen of spades costs 13, and when the match ends the lowest score wins. A trick is one round of four cards; the highest card of the suit that was led takes it.

The deal

A full 52-card deck, ace high, 13 cards each, 13 tricks in a hand.

Passing three cards

Before each hand everyone picks three cards to hand to another player, all four at the same time. Tap a card to choose it, tap it again to take it back, and press Pass when three are standing up. Once you have passed you cannot change your mind, and the cards only change hands when the last player is done. Nobody sees what you chose, and you see what you were given only after the exchange.

The direction changes every hand, as the seats are drawn on your screen: to the player on your left, then on your right, then across, and on every fourth hand there is no pass at all. Then it starts over.

Choosing takes longer than playing a card, so the clock for the pass is one and a half times the clock for a card. If it runs out, the table chooses for you.

Playing a trick

Whoever holds the two of clubs after the pass opens the hand with it. The turn then moves to the player on the right, everyone adds one card, and the winner of a trick leads the next one. There is no trump: the highest card of the led suit always wins. The duties:

• Follow the suit that was led if you hold it. Out of the suit, play anything you like - this is how hearts and the queen find their way to somebody else.
• No points on the first trick. You may not play a heart or the queen of spades on the opening trick, unless your hand holds nothing else.
• Hearts may not be led until a heart has been played on some trick, which players call breaking hearts. The exception is a hand that holds nothing but hearts. The queen of spades does not break hearts.

Tap a card the table will not take and it tells you why. The bar at the top shows whether hearts are open yet, and every seat shows the points it has taken this hand.

Scoring a hand

• Each heart you took is 1 point and the queen of spades is 13, so a hand hands out 26 points in all.
• Shooting the moon: take all thirteen hearts and the queen of spades and you score nothing, while the other three players take 26 points each. That is always how it is scored, even in the rare case where it does not help the player who did it.

How the match ends

The table owner chooses before the first deal. Either the match runs until somebody reaches a target - 50 or 100 points, with 100 as the default - or it runs a fixed number of hands. A hand is always finished. When the match ends the player with the fewest points wins; if two players share the lowest score, another hand is played until one of them is ahead. A safety cap stops any match after 99 hands.

House rules

Hearts has one switch, set by whoever opens the table:

• Jack of diamonds, off by default: switched on, whoever takes the jack of diamonds scores 10 points less for the hand. It does not count towards shooting the moon.

At the table

Your seat has a clock that runs around your avatar. At relaxed tempo you get 60 seconds per card, at normal 30, at fast 15, and one and a half times that for the pass. Run out of time and the table plays a legal move for you; do that three turns in a row and it keeps playing your seat until you press Take over or play a card yourself. A lost connection holds your seat 60 seconds, or 10 if Discord tells us you closed the game. Leaving a match on purpose gives your seat to a bot for good.

The other games

Back to how to play, or read the rules for Batak, Spades, Tarneeb and Baloot.