Hearts ♥

Take as few as you can · Queen of Spades costs 13

Scores

Play

Opponents

Strength

Speed

Game

Game ends at

Passing

Jack of Diamonds scores −10“Omnibus” hearts: whoever takes J♦ knocks ten points off their score. Shooting the moon takes 26 offInstead of giving the other three players 26 each. Show which cards I may play

This hand

How to play

Four players, thirteen cards each, and one aim: take as few penalty cards as you can. Every heart you win costs 1 point and the Q♠ costs 13 — twenty-six points in every hand.
Before the first card is led, choose three cards to pass. The direction turns each hand: left, right, across, then a hand with no passing at all.
Whoever holds ♣2 leads it. After that the winner of each trick leads the next.
Follow suit if you can. If you can’t, play anything — that’s your chance to throw a heart or the Queen at someone else.
The highest card of the led suit takes the trick, along with any penalty cards in it. Aces are high; there are no trumps.
No hearts and no Q♠ may be played on the first trick — unless your hand holds nothing else.
Hearts can’t be led until they are “broken” — that is, until someone has played a heart on another suit. A player left holding nothing but point cards may lead one anyway.
Shooting the moon: take all twenty-six points in a hand and you score nothing while everyone else takes 26. Tick the setting above to take 26 off your own score instead.
The game ends when someone reaches 100 (or 50, if you prefer a short game). The lowest score wins. If the two lowest are level, another hand is played to settle it.
Click a card in your hand to play it. Cards you may play stand tall; the rest are dimmed. Hint shows the card the Hard computer would pick, and during the pass it marks the three it would give away.
How the computer plays: it remembers every card played and every suit each player has shown out of, then deals the unseen cards into plausible hands and plays each hand out many times over to see which card leaves it with the fewest points — including the risk that someone is shooting the moon. Hard weighs up to forty of those imagined hands per card; Normal plays by solid rules of thumb — duck under the trick, dump the Queen, keep low cards; Easy is careless.
Online friend sends a link. Your friend sits across the table and the other two seats are played by the computer. The deal is made by both devices together — each adds a secret random number, sealed with a cryptographic hash before the other’s is seen — and at the end of every hand each device checks that the cards it was dealt were the ones promised before a single card was played.

Strategy

Get short in a suit. A suit you can’t follow is a suit you can throw hearts on. Passing away your last two diamonds is often worth more than passing a high card.
Mind the Queen. Holding Q♠ with only two or three other spades is dangerous — the Ace and King will be led at you. With five spades behind her she’s a weapon: duck under A♠ or K♠ and the leader takes 13.
Keep the little ones. ♣2, ♦3, ♥4 — low cards let you follow suit without winning. High cards in a long suit are what get you stuck on lead late in the hand.
Count the trick before you play. Last to play and the trick is clean? Take it with your highest card and be rid of it. Points in the trick? Play your smallest.
Watch for the moon. If one player has taken every point so far, take a trick — one heart of your own saves you 26.
Remember what you passed. Those three cards tell you exactly what one opponent is holding. Hand the Queen to your left and you know better than to lead spades at them.