How many players do you need for Hearts?

Standard Hearts is built for exactly four players, each dealt thirteen cards, with no partnerships. Three- and five-player versions exist but require removing cards from the deck so the deal comes out even, which changes how safely you can count a suit.

Why can't I lead a heart at the start of a hand?

Hearts must be broken before they can be led. A heart is only playable when someone is unable to follow the led suit and discards one, or when a player holds nothing but hearts. The rule stops the first player from dumping penalty cards before anyone has had a chance to build a defence.

What does shooting the moon mean?

It means deliberately taking all thirteen hearts and the Queen of Spades in a single hand. Instead of collecting 26 penalty points you score zero and every opponent takes 26. It only works if you capture every penalty card — one heart slipping away collapses the attempt and leaves you with a very large score.

Is the Queen of Spades really worth thirteen points?

Yes. The thirteen hearts are worth one point each and the Queen is worth thirteen on her own, so she accounts for exactly half the 26 points available in a hand. That is why so much of Hearts revolves around who is holding her and who can be forced to take her.

Do I have to follow suit?

If you hold a card of the suit that was led, you must play one. Only when you are void in the led suit may you play something else — and that discard is your chance to unload hearts or the Queen onto whoever wins the trick.

How does scoring work, and when does the game end?

Penalty points accumulate hand after hand. The game ends as soon as any player reaches 100 or more, and the winner is whoever has the lowest total at that moment, not the player who crossed the line. If the two lowest scores are tied, play continues until a single leader emerges.

What are the three cards I pass at the start of each hand?

Each player chooses three cards to hand to an opponent, and the direction rotates: left, right, across, then a hand with no passing. You pass before seeing what is coming back, so it is a blind trade — and usually the most consequential decision of the deal.

Hearts

Hearts is the best-known member of a small, contrary family of card games where the object is to lose. Thirteen tricks are played, and almost everything you can win is something you would rather not have.

You are South. Click a card to play it; the game enforces the rules, so anything it will not let you do is a move Hearts does not allow.

Players	4, no partnerships
Deck	One standard 52-card deck, 13 cards each
Play time	15–25 minutes to reach 100 points
Difficulty	Easy to learn, hard to play well

How to play Hearts

Hearts uses the full 52-card deck with no jokers, dealt out one at a time until all four players hold thirteen cards. Cards rank in the ordinary way, ace high down to two, and no suit is trump. There is nothing to bid and no partner to signal to; the entire game is a matter of what you keep, what you pass, and what you are forced to pick up.

Every heart you end up holding at the end of the hand costs you one penalty point. The Queen of Spades costs thirteen by herself. That makes 26 points on the table each hand, and your job is to collect as few of them as possible.

Passing

Before a card is played, each player picks three cards from their hand and passes them face down to an opponent. The direction changes every hand in a four-hand cycle: to the player on your left, then to your right, then straight across the table, and then a hand where nobody passes anything. You choose your three cards before you see what is coming to you, so you are always trading blind.

The play

Whoever holds the two of clubs leads it — that card, specifically, always opens the hand. Play then moves clockwise, and each player must follow the led suit if they hold anything in it. If you are void in that suit you may play any card you like, and that is the moment when hearts and the Queen of Spades change hands.

The highest card of the led suit takes the trick along with any penalty cards sitting in it, and the winner leads the next trick. Nothing beats a suit from outside it, because there is no trump; a spade played on a diamond lead simply cannot win, however high it is.

Two restrictions shape the early game. Hearts cannot be led until they have been broken, meaning a heart has already been discarded by someone unable to follow suit. And on the very first trick no penalty card may be played at all — no hearts, and not the Queen of Spades — so the opening round is always safe.

Scoring and winning

At the end of each hand, players count the hearts they took and add thirteen if they were left with the Queen. Those points are added to a running total that carries across hands. As soon as one player reaches 100 or more, the game stops and the player with the lowest total wins. Crossing 100 does not eliminate you from anything; it simply ends the game, and if you are still the lowest scorer at that moment you have won.

Shooting the moon

There is one way to turn the whole game inside out. If you take all thirteen hearts and the Queen of Spades in a single hand, you have shot the moon: you score nothing and each of your three opponents is charged 26 points instead. It is the single largest swing available in Hearts, and it demands a hand with enough high cards to win tricks whenever you want them. The catch is absolute — if even one heart ends up in front of another player, the attempt is void and you keep every penalty point you have collected.

Strategy

Hearts is a game of forced choices. Good players do not try to win tricks; they arrange their hand so that when they must take a trick, it is a cheap one.

Keep your low spades, whatever else you pass

The whole game is organised around the Queen of Spades, and the only reliable protection from her is holding small spades — the two, three, four and five. If spades are led and you can follow with a four, you cannot be handed the Queen on that trick. Players who pass their low spades away because they look like junk have thrown away the cheapest insurance in the game.

Holding the ace and king of spades is a liability, not a strength

This is the mistake nearly every new player makes, and it is worth stating plainly. The ace and king of spades are high cards, so beginners hang on to them, and it loses hands. If someone leads a low spade to flush out the Queen, your ace has to win the trick — and if the Queen has already been played into it, you take thirteen points for nothing. Unless you are holding the Queen yourself, or you have a genuine run of small spades to duck behind, pass those top spades on.

Manufacture a void, but pick the right suit

Being void in a suit is what lets you throw a heart or the Queen at somebody else, so using your three passed cards to empty a suit entirely is a strong opening plan. Which suit matters: void yourself in clubs or diamonds, never in spades. A spade void feels liberating for one trick and then leaves you defenceless the moment the Queen appears.

Count the spades, not just the hearts

Once you know how many spades have been played, you know whether the Queen is still lurking. Until she appears, every spade trick is dangerous and any suit is safer to lead. After she is gone, spades become the most harmless suit on the table and you can lead them freely to run out an opponent's safe cards.

Lead your long suit early, not your short one

Leading from a suit you hold five or six cards in forces everyone else to spend their cards in it while nothing much is at stake. That drains the safe discards out of their hands, so that later — when you finally lead something you want them to take — they have no comfortable answer. Leading a short suit does the opposite: it hands your opponents the lead and lets them start dictating.

Break up somebody else's moon before you worry about your own

If a player has taken the first several tricks unopposed, assume they are shooting and take one heart deliberately, even at a cost of a few points. Two or three points is nothing against the 26 you would otherwise be charged. This is the discipline that separates players who understand the risk from players who watch it happen.

Variants

Hearts has been rewritten wherever it has travelled, and most house rules are variations on how the penalty cards are weighted.

Black Lady — the version described above, with the Queen of Spades worth thirteen. It is now so widespread in English-speaking countries that most people simply call it Hearts.
Omnibus Hearts — adds the jack of diamonds as a bonus card worth minus ten, giving players a reason to fight for a trick rather than duck every one.
Spot Hearts — hearts score their face value instead of one point each, so the ace of hearts alone can cost fourteen. It makes the high hearts far more dangerous and shifts almost all the tension away from the Queen.
Cancellation Hearts — played with two shuffled decks for six or more players. Identical cards cancel each other out, so a trick can be won by a surprisingly modest card.
Black Maria — the British three-player relative, in which the ace and king of spades usually carry penalties alongside the Queen and the deck is trimmed so the deal comes out even.
No-pass and rotating-pass rules — some tables drop the pass entirely, others pass only two cards, and others keep the four-hand rotation described above. It changes the game more than it sounds like it should.

Where Hearts came from

Hearts belongs to a category card historians call reverse or trick-avoidance games, and its ancestry is usually traced to Reversis, a Spanish game documented as early as the fifteenth century in which the object was to take as few tricks as possible. The historian David Parlett, in his writing on the history of card games, places the modern game as a nineteenth-century development out of that older family.

The recognisable form appeared in the United States in the 1880s, played without the Queen of Spades — hearts alone were the penalty. The Queen arrived later as an American addition, and the variant known as Black Lady gradually displaced the plain game so completely that the addition is now treated as the standard. John McLeod's long-running card game archive documents this shift in detail across regional versions, and Hearts' spread as a computer game owed a good deal to its inclusion in Microsoft Windows from the early 1990s, which introduced it to an enormous number of people who had never played it with a physical deck.

Questions people ask about Hearts

How many players do you need for Hearts?: Standard Hearts is built for exactly four players, each dealt thirteen cards, with no partnerships. Three- and five-player versions exist but require removing cards from the deck so the deal comes out even, which changes how safely you can count a suit.
Why can't I lead a heart at the start of a hand?: Hearts must be broken before they can be led. A heart is only playable when someone is unable to follow the led suit and discards one, or when a player holds nothing but hearts. The rule stops the first player from dumping penalty cards before anyone has had a chance to build a defence.
What does shooting the moon mean?: It means deliberately taking all thirteen hearts and the Queen of Spades in a single hand. Instead of collecting 26 penalty points you score zero and every opponent takes 26. It only works if you capture every penalty card — one heart slipping away collapses the attempt and leaves you with a very large score.
Is the Queen of Spades really worth thirteen points?: Yes. The thirteen hearts are worth one point each and the Queen is worth thirteen on her own, so she accounts for exactly half the 26 points available in a hand. That is why so much of Hearts revolves around who is holding her and who can be forced to take her.
Do I have to follow suit?: If you hold a card of the suit that was led, you must play one. Only when you are void in the led suit may you play something else — and that discard is your chance to unload hearts or the Queen onto whoever wins the trick.
How does scoring work, and when does the game end?: Penalty points accumulate hand after hand. The game ends as soon as any player reaches 100 or more, and the winner is whoever has the lowest total at that moment, not the player who crossed the line. If the two lowest scores are tied, play continues until a single leader emerges.
What are the three cards I pass at the start of each hand?: Each player chooses three cards to hand to an opponent, and the direction rotates: left, right, across, then a hand with no passing. You pass before seeing what is coming back, so it is a blind trade — and usually the most consequential decision of the deal.