How to play Hearts, and when to try shooting the moon

The point of Hearts is to take no points

Hearts is a four-player trick game with no trump and no partners, and the scoring is backwards. Every heart you take in a trick is a point against you, and the queen of spades is thirteen. The game ends when someone reaches the limit — usually 100 — and the player with the lowest total wins.

So the skill is ducking. You want to play a low card under someone else's high one, and you want to run out of a suit early so that, when it is led, you can throw your dangerous cards onto a trick somebody else is winning. That is what makes Hearts feel sneaky in a way most card games do not.

The pass: hand your problems to a neighbour

Before each hand, everyone chooses three cards to pass. The direction rotates: to the left on the first hand, to the right on the second, across the table on the third, and on the fourth hand nobody passes. Then the cycle starts again.

The classic cards to pass are the queen of spades (unless you hold several spades to protect her), the ace and king of spades (which are likely to capture the queen), and high hearts. Passing a whole short suit is the other good idea: if you get rid of your only two clubs, you can throw points onto every club trick that follows.

At a real table the pass is where people peek, swap the wrong way, or pick up the cards before choosing their own. On PartyDen you pick your three on the fan, the board shows who has chosen (never which cards), and the swap happens all at once when the fourth person has picked. Your three new cards are marked in your hand so you know what arrived.

How a hand is played

Whoever holds the two of clubs leads it to the first trick. You must follow suit if you can; otherwise you may play anything. The highest card of the suit led wins the trick, and its winner leads the next.

Two rules protect the opening. On the first trick you may not play a heart or the queen of spades unless your hand gives you no other choice, so nobody is landed with points before the game has begun. And nobody may lead a heart until a heart has been played to a trick — hearts are "broken" — unless the leader has nothing but hearts left.

Those two are the rules people remember differently, and the app enforces both. The board tells you when hearts are broken and shows the points each player has collected so far this hand.

Shooting the moon

There is one way to turn the scoring round. If you take every heart and the queen of spades in a single hand — all 26 points — you score nothing for that hand and every other player takes 26 instead. It is called shooting the moon, and it is the move a table talks about afterwards.

It is also the trap of the game. A player collecting hearts in the middle of a hand might be going for the moon, or might simply be losing badly, and the other three have to decide whether to spend a high heart stopping them. Taking just one heart to stop a moon costs you a point and saves you 26. Hold one high heart back for exactly that moment if you can.

Try a moon when you hold the high spades and long, high hearts, ideally after a pass that gave you more of both. Try it once, and expect it to fail more often than it works. That is part of the fun.

Hearts or Spades for four people

Both are four-player trick games on the same deck, and they suit different groups. Spades is played in partnerships and rewards bidding and teamwork; Hearts is everyone for themselves and rewards patience and a little cruelty. If your group likes a game where two people can scheme together, pick Spades. If they like quietly ruining one person's evening, pick Hearts.

For a group that already plays Call Break or Judgement, Hearts is the easiest new game to add: the follow-suit habit carries straight over, and the only new idea is that tricks are bad. A game to 100 runs about half an hour; a game to 50 is a good warm-up.