Hearts

How to play Hearts

Hearts is a trick-taking card game for four players, and the goal is to take as few points as possible. You play against three computer players: West, North and East.

• Points: every heart you take is worth 1 point, and the queen of spades is worth 13. The other cards are worth nothing.
• Passing: before each hand, everyone passes 3 cards. The direction rotates: to the left, to the right, across the table, then a hand with no passing.
• Tricks: whoever holds the 2 of clubs leads it to start the first trick. Everyone plays one card in turn, and you must follow suit (play the suit that was led) if you can. The highest card of the suit led takes the trick and leads the next one. Aces are high.
• Can't follow suit? Then you can play any card, which is your chance to get rid of hearts or the queen of spades.
• Hearts are broken once someone plays a heart. Until then, nobody can lead a heart unless they hold nothing else.
• No points on the first trick: you can't play a heart or the queen of spades on the first trick, unless your hand leaves no other choice.

The game ends when someone reaches 100 points at the end of a hand. The lowest score wins.

Shooting the moon

If you take all 13 hearts and the queen of spades in one hand, you "shoot the moon": you score 0 for that hand, and every other player gets 26. It's risky, because if another player takes even one heart, you're stuck with most of the points.

Playing on Poozee

• Pick a level. Easy makes lots of mistakes. Medium plays by solid rules of thumb. Hard imagines many possible deals of the cards it can't see, plays each option out and picks the one that works best. It never looks at your cards.
• Cards you can't play are dimmed on your turn. Tap one anyway and the game tells you why.
• Cards passed to you are marked with a yellow dot until the first trick.
• Hint suggests three cards to pass, or the card the Hard computer would play.
• Your game is saved in your browser, so you can close the tab and finish later.

Hearts strategy basics

1. Duck under the winning card. When you follow suit, play the highest card that's still lower than the card currently winning the trick. You keep your low cards for later and avoid taking the trick. In our computer tests this mattered more than any other habit.
2. Pass the queen of spades unless it's protected. With three or more lower spades, the queen is fairly safe. With fewer, pass it, along with an unprotected ace or king of spades.
3. Throw away the queen first. When you can't follow suit, get rid of the queen of spades, then the ace and king of spades, then your highest hearts.
4. Take free tricks when you play last. If the trick has no points, win it with your highest card and get rid of a card that could hurt you later.
5. Watch for the moon. If one player has taken every point so far and keeps winning tricks, take a heart yourself to stop them before it's too late.

Our Hearts strategy guide tests each of these over 20,000 computer hands, along with two popular tips that turned out not to matter.

Pro tip: Keep track of the queen of spades. Until it's been played, the ace and king of spades are dangerous cards to hold, and leading low spades is a good way to force the queen out.

About Hearts

Hearts descends from Reversis, an older European card game, and took its modern form in the United States in the late 1800s. The queen of spades penalty came later, in a variant once called Black Lady. A version of Hearts also came with Microsoft Windows for many years, which is where a lot of people first learned it.