How to play Spades

The rules exactly as High Card Club plays them.

Spades is a partnership game for four players. You and the player opposite you are a team and share one score; the two players beside you are the other team. Spades are always trump, so there is nothing to choose. A trick is one round of four cards; the best card wins it.

The deal

A full 52-card deck, ace high, 13 cards each, 13 tricks in a hand. The deal moves one seat to the left after every hand, and the player to the dealer's left speaks and leads first.

The bidding

Starting to the dealer's left, each player says once how many tricks they will take. There is no pass in Spades: everybody names a number from 0 to 13. Zero is called nil: a promise to take no trick at all, scored on its own.

You do not have to beat the player before you, and the four bids do not have to add up to 13. A team's contract is simply the sum of its two bids, with a nil partner's bid left out of it. As soon as the fourth bid is in, play starts.

Playing a trick

The lead card sets the suit. Going clockwise, everyone adds one card, and the winner leads the next trick. The highest spade wins the trick; if no spade was played, the highest card of the led suit wins. Two duties only:

• Follow the suit that was led if you hold it. There is no duty to beat the winning card, and no duty to trump when you are void: out of the suit, play anything you like.
• Spades may not be led until a spade has been played on some trick, which players call breaking spades. The one exception is a hand that holds nothing but spades.

Tap a card the table will not take and it tells you why: the suit was led and you hold it, or spades are not broken yet.

Scoring a hand

Both teams are scored when the thirteenth trick is collected.

• A team that takes at least its contract scores 10 points per trick bid, plus 1 point for each extra trick. Bid 7 and take 9: 70 plus 2, so 72.
• A team that falls short loses 10 points per trick bid. A failed 7 is -70, however many tricks came in.
• Those extra tricks are called bags, and they are kept on a running count. Every 10 bags cost 100 points, and the count starts over from what is left above ten. Small greedy overtricks add up.
• Nil scores +100 if that player takes no trick and -100 if they take even one. Either way the tricks a nil player takes are bags for the team, and they never help the partner's contract.

A hand's total for a team is its contract, plus its bags, plus any nil result, minus any bag penalty.

How the match ends

The table owner chooses before the first deal. Either the match runs to a target score - 200, 300 or 500 points, with 500 as the default - or it runs a fixed number of hands: 5, 9 or 11, five by default. A hand is always finished, and if both teams are level when the match should end, another hand is played until one is ahead. A safety cap stops any match after 99 hands.

House rules

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

• Bag penalty, on by default: 10 bags cost 100 points, as above. Switched off, overtricks are still worth a point each but never cost anything.

At the table

Your seat has a clock that runs around your avatar. At relaxed tempo you get 60 seconds per card and 75 to bid, at normal 30 and 40, at fast 15 and 25. 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, and your partner is stuck with it.

The other games

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