The history of Hearts

The ancestor: games where you want to lose

Most card games reward taking tricks. A smaller family — the reverse games — punishes it, and Hearts is the most successful member. The ancestor is Reversis, played in Spain and France from the seventeenth century, in which certain cards carried penalties and the aim was to avoid them.

Reversis had one feature that Hearts kept and one it dropped. It kept the inverted objective. It dropped the complexity: Reversis involved a pot, side payments and a pile of special cases, and the American game that replaced it in the 1880s reduced all of it to a single rule — hearts are penalty cards.

The queen of spades changes everything

Early Hearts was a mild game: thirteen hearts at a point each, and the worst possible hand cost you thirteen. Adding the queen of spades at 13 points, in the early twentieth century, transformed it.

The queen's arrival did three things:

• It created a single card worth as much as the entire rest of the deck's penalties, so one trick can decide a hand.
• It made the spade suit a game within the game — holding the ace or king of spades becomes a liability rather than a strength.
• It made shooting the moon dramatic, since the shooter must take the queen too.

The variant was known as Black Lady in America and Black Maria in Britain, and within a few decades it had simply become Hearts — nobody plays the queen-less version any more.

Windows, and the networking demo nobody noticed

Hearts reached its largest audience the way Solitaire and Minesweeper did — by being bundled with Windows. Microsoft Hearts shipped with Windows for Workgroups in 1992 and with later versions of Windows for years afterwards.

Its inclusion had a specific technical purpose: it was a demonstration of NetDDE, Microsoft's early networking protocol for exchanging data between machines on a local network. Four people in an office could play a card game against each other, which was the friendliest possible proof that the networking stack worked.

The result, as with Solitaire, is that an old card game acquired tens of millions of players who had never seen it on a table — and that "Hearts" now means, for many people, a specific green-felt window with three computer opponents.

Hearts today

Hearts remains one of the most played card games in the English-speaking world, and it holds up for a reason: it takes minutes to teach, supports four players without partnerships, and has a skill ceiling much higher than its simplicity suggests. Passing, counting and the moon-shot threat give it more depth than any other game in the "avoid the penalty" family.

It has no world championship and no governing body, which is probably why it has stayed so uniform: everyone plays essentially the same rules, with the same small set of house variations — the jack of diamonds, the perfect-100 reset, and whether the queen also breaks hearts.

Common questions