Spades rules

Spades is a trick-taking game for four players in two fixed partnerships, partners sitting opposite each other. A standard 52-card deck is dealt out completely, thirteen cards each, and every hand is thirteen tricks.

What makes it Spades rather than any other trick-taking game is the bid: before play, each player commits to a number of tricks, and the partnership is scored against the sum of its two numbers. A game runs to 500 points and takes 25 to 35 minutes.

One standard 52-card deck, no jokers. All of it is dealt, thirteen cards to each player, so there is no stock and nothing face up.

Aces are high. Within each suit the order runs ace, king, queen, jack, ten and down to the two.

The deal rotates clockwise, one player to the left each hand. Two chapters below turn on who dealt — the bidding opens to the dealer's left and so does the first trick — so it matters that it moves rather than who starts with it.

Starting to the dealer's left and going clockwise, each player states a number of tricks from 0 to 13. A player bids having seen their own thirteen cards and having heard whatever bids came before theirs — which is the only information anybody ever gives their partner.

The two partners' bids are added. That sum is the partnership's contract, and there is no requirement that each partner take their own number — a hand of eight tricks and five makes a contract of six and seven exactly as well as one of seven and six.

The exception is a nil, which is not added to anything and is scored on its own. #nil has the whole of it, including what happens to the tricks a failed nil takes.

A bid of 0 is nil and is scored differently — see #nil. Table talk about your hand is not part of the game; the number is the whole of what you may say.

The player to the dealer's left leads the first trick, and the winner of each trick leads the next. Play is clockwise.

Every player must follow the suit led if they hold a card in it. A player holding none of that suit may play any card, including a spade.

The trick is won by the highest spade in it. If it contains no spade, it is won by the highest card of the suit that was led. Cards of other non-trump suits cannot win a trick however high they are.

A spade may not be led — only played on a suit you are out of — until spades have been broken — that is, until a spade has been played on a trick whose suit somebody could not follow.

A player whose entire remaining hand is spades may lead one regardless, because the alternative is a player with no legal move.

After thirteen tricks, each partnership compares the tricks it took against the contract it bid.

Missing a contract is scored on what you bid, not on what you took. A partnership that bids seven and takes six loses 70, and the six tricks earn nothing at all.

A bag is one trick taken beyond the contract. Each is worth one point immediately, and each is also counted on a running tally that does not reset between hands.

The tenth bag costs the partnership 100 points and removes ten from the tally, leaving any extras behind. A partnership on nine bags that takes three overtricks pays the 100 and starts again on two.

Bags are the reason the bidding is a real decision. Without them the safe bid would always be low, every hand would end in a pile of uncounted overtricks, and nothing about the contract would matter.

A bid of 0 is a promise to take no tricks whatsoever. Made, it is worth 100 to the partnership; failed — a single trick is enough — it costs 100.

The nil bidder's partner bids normally, and that bid alone is the partnership's contract. The partner is scored against it in the usual way, and the nil is scored separately on top.

A failed nil is the case worth stating exactly, because it is where two reasonable readings part. The tricks a failed nil bidder takes do not help their partner make the contract — the partner has to take all of it alone — but those tricks are counted, as bags, against the partnership. So a failed nil costs 100, leaves the contract as hard as it was, and adds to the bag tally on the way.

Both partners may bid nil in the same hand. The partnership then has a contract of zero, two chances at 100, and no protection for either of them.

Blind nil — bidding nil before looking at your cards, for double — is deliberately not played here. It is a decision made with no information, and it hands the losing partnership a coin flip as a reward for being behind.

Hands are played until a partnership reaches 500 points. That partnership wins; if both cross 500 on the same hand, the higher score wins.

Scores can go down as well as up, through missed contracts, failed nils and bag penalties, so a partnership can lead for most of a game and lose it in two hands.

Spades has a large family of house rules, and each of the ones below changes the game enough to be a different game. What is above is the whole of what we implement, and this chapter exists so that a reader who plays one of these is told rather than left to assume.

• Jokers, and the deuce-of-diamonds or deuce-of-spades promotions that come with them.

• Blind nil, and blind bids generally.

• Mirror, suicide and whiz bidding, each of which replaces the bidding decision rather than adjusting it.

• Three-player and cutthroat Spades, which has no partnerships and so does not force the capability this cartridge exists for.

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

Four players in two partnerships, 45 seconds a turn, and a game to 500.

The rating is the interesting part and the reason this title is on the roadmap at all. Two people win and lose together, so a result is about a pair rather than a player — which neither Glicko-2 nor the TrueSkill setup behind our four-player games does today. Spades is the cartridge that forces it.

Neither watchable nor playable a move at a time, and for the same reason as Hearts: four hands are concealed, so a spectator would need a view that is nobody's seat, and the bidding has every seat deciding before anybody plays. Both are mechanisms the platform has not written — NowPlay-GG/platform#740.