Hearts rules

Hearts is a trick-taking game for exactly four players, each playing for themselves. A standard 52-card deck is dealt out completely, thirteen cards each, and the hand is played as thirteen tricks.

Unlike most trick-taking games, taking tricks is bad. Thirteen of the cards carry penalty points, and the object is to finish with fewer than everybody else. A full game runs until somebody reaches 100 points and usually takes 20 to 30 minutes.

Fourteen cards in the deck matter to the score. The other thirty-eight are worth nothing at all, which is why a trick full of clubs is a trick nobody minds taking.

That is 26 points in the deck every hand, and all 26 are taken by somebody. The scores of all four players always add up to 26, or to 78 when a hand is shot.

All 52 cards are dealt one at a time, thirteen to each player. There is no stock and no discard pile — every card in the deck is in somebody's hand when the first trick is led.

Before play, each player chooses three cards from their hand and passes them to another player, receiving three in return. All four players choose at once and hand over at once, so nobody sees what is coming before deciding what to send.

The direction changes every hand on a four-hand cycle, so over four hands you pass to each opponent once and keep your hand once.

The cycle then repeats. Because the pass is simultaneous, Hearts is not offered as a slow-play game here: correspondence play over a phase where all four seats act at once is a different design, and it is not one we have built.

The player holding the two of clubs leads it — that specific card, every hand, so the first trick is never a decision. Play then proceeds clockwise.

Each player must follow the suit led if they hold a card in it. A player with none of that suit may play any card at all, which is how penalty cards get discarded onto other people.

The highest card of the suit that was led wins the trick. Cards of other suits cannot win it however high they are — there is no trump suit in Hearts. The winner takes all four cards and leads the next trick.

Neither a heart nor the queen of spades may be played on the first trick, even by a player holding no clubs. Somebody with a hand of nothing but hearts and the queen is the one exception, and may then play a heart.

This exists so that the queen cannot be dumped on whoever happens to hold the two of clubs before anybody has made a single decision.

A heart may not be led — only discarded — until hearts have been broken. Hearts are broken the first time one is played on a trick whose suit somebody could not follow — that is, the first time a heart is discarded.

A player whose entire remaining hand is hearts may lead one whether or not they have been broken, because the alternative is a player who cannot move.

The queen of spades is not subject to this. A spade may be led at any time, and leading spades early is how the queen is hunted.

A player who takes all thirteen hearts and the queen of spades in one hand has shot the moon. Instead of scoring 26, they score nothing and each of the other three players scores 26.

All fourteen cards are required. Twelve hearts and the queen is not a moon; it is 25 points and a bad hand.

We add 26 to the others rather than subtracting 26 from the shooter. Both are played; adding is the version that cannot take a score below zero, and so cannot break the frame that the lowest score wins.

After the thirteenth trick, each player counts the penalty cards they took and adds them to a running total. Hands continue until at least one player has reached 100 points.

The game ends there, at the end of that hand, and the player with the lowest total wins. If a hand takes two players past 100 at once, it makes no difference: the lowest score still wins.

Hearts has more named variants than almost any card game, and several are common enough that somebody will expect them. What is above is the whole of what we implement.

• The jack of diamonds scoring minus ten — a different game with a different shape of decision.

• Black Maria, which is played by three with a stripped deck.

• Any rule making the queen of spades break hearts, or ending the hand when she falls.

• Three-player and five-player deals. Hearts here is exactly four.

None of it is playable here yet — Hearts is on the workshop bench, and what gets built next is decided by the vote on the shelf.

Four players, each for themselves, rated with TrueSkill — the rating system this game exists to bring to the platform, because Glicko-2 rates one player against one opponent and Hearts has three. Forty-five seconds a turn.

Not watchable, and not playable a move at a time. Both follow from the same fact: four hands are concealed, so a spectator needs a view of the table that is nobody's seat, and the pass has all four players acting at once.

Both are mechanisms the platform has not written rather than decisions about Hearts — see #the-pass for the second, and NowPlay-GG/platform#740 for the first.