How to Play Hearts

Hearts is a trick-taking game for three to five players, each on their own, no partnerships. The goal is to avoid taking certain cards. Lowest score wins.

The deal

The deck is dealt out completely, one card at a time, so everyone ends with the same number of cards. Four-handed uses the full 52-card deck; the three- and five-handed games remove a low card or two so the deck divides evenly:

Players	Cards removed	Deck	Each player gets
3	2	51	17
4	none	52	13
5	2 and 2	50	10

The cards taken out are deliberately worthless ones: no heart and never the queen of spades. That’s what keeps the scoring identical at every table size (see below).

Passing

Before play starts, each player passes exactly 3 cards to another player, whatever the table size. The direction rotates hand to hand, and the cycle is always as long as the table is wide, so everyone has passed to everyone else before a hold hand comes round again:

Four players

1. Pass left
2. Pass right
3. Pass across
4. Hold, no pass at all
5. Pass left again, and so on

Three players (there’s nobody sitting “across”, so the cycle is shorter)

1. Pass left
2. Pass right
3. Hold
4. Pass left again, and so on

Five players (two extra directions take the place of “across”)

1. Pass left
2. Pass right
3. Pass two seats left
4. Pass two seats right
5. Hold
6. Pass left again, and so on

Everyone chooses their 3 cards and passes at the same time. You don’t see what you’re receiving until after you’ve committed to what you’re giving away.

Playing a trick

The player holding the 2 of clubs leads it to open the first trick of the hand; this is mandatory, not a choice. In the five-handed game the 2 has been removed from the deck, so the 3 of clubs leads instead. After that, the winner of each trick leads the next one.

You must follow the suit that was led if you have a card of that suit. If you don’t, you may play anything, including a heart or the queen of spades.

Two restrictions on top of that:

• Hearts can’t be led until a heart has already been played on some earlier trick (“hearts broken”), unless your hand is nothing but hearts, in which case you have no choice.
• On the very first trick of the hand, nobody may play a heart or the queen of spades, not even as a discard when void in the led suit, unless that’s literally the only kind of card left in your hand (in the case of hearts).

Whoever plays the highest card of the suit that was led wins the trick and takes every card played to it, face down. There’s no trump suit in Hearts.

Example trick

Clubs are led. Note that this is not the first hand since the 2 of clubs was not led. Hands are otherwise irrelevant to this trick except who can follow:

Seat	Plays	Note
Lead	7	opens the trick
Next	J	follows suit
Next	2	void in clubs, breaks hearts
Next	A	follows suit, wins the trick

Ace of clubs wins: it’s the highest club played, and the 2 discard doesn’t count since hearts wasn’t led. Hearts is now broken for the rest of the hand.

Scoring

At the end of the hand, points are counted from the cards each player took in tricks:

• Each heart is worth 1 point.
• The queen of spades is worth 13 points.
• Every other card is worth 0 (unless playing with house rules).

That’s 26 points on the table every hand, split up among however many tricks each player won. It’s 26 at every table size, because the cards the three- and five-handed decks remove are worth nothing. Lower is better; you’re trying to stay away from hearts and the queen of spades, not win tricks for their own sake.

Shooting the moon

If one player takes every single heart and the queen of spades in one hand, all 26 points, the scoring flips: the shooter scores 0 for the hand, and everyone else gets 26 added to their total instead. That costs the table more the more players there are, so a moon is worth chasing harder five-handed than three-handed.

Game end

The game ends the moment any player’s running total reaches 100 or more (or whatever arbitrary score you decide to play to), as long as one player is alone on the lowest total. That player wins.

A game of Hearts never ends level. If two or more players are tied for the lowest total when somebody crosses the line, nobody has won yet: deal another hand and keep going until one of them is in front on their own.

Worked example

Say the queen of spades and the 13 hearts got taken across a four-player table this hand:

Seat	Hearts taken	Queen of spades	Hand score
A	3	no	3
B	4	no	4
C	4	yes	17
D	2	no	2

Nobody took all 26, so no moon shot; everyone just adds their hand score to their running total.

If instead seat A had taken all 13 hearts and the queen (26 points, everyone else 0), it flips: A adds 0, and B, C, D each add 26. At a five-player table the same shot would hand 26 to four opponents rather than three.