Hearts

The Queen of Spades runs the game

Everything in Hearts orbits one card. The Queen of Spades is worth thirteen penalty points on her own, as much as every heart in the deck combined, so most of a round is really a long game of hot potato around that single card. Holding her, you want to slide her into a trick somebody else wins. Not holding her, you want to force her into the open while making sure the trick she lands on is not yours. The classic way to smoke her out is to lead low spades, again and again: whoever holds the Queen must either burn their small spades following suit or finally drop her, and if an Ace or King of Spades sits unguarded somewhere, a third spade lead usually pins the Queen onto it.

That is why the shape of your spade holding matters more than its height. The Ace or King with two or three small spades behind them is comfortable: you duck the early leads and choose your moment. The same honors bare are a time bomb, because a few spade leads will force you to win exactly the trick where the Queen appears.

The pass is half the round

Before play you pass three cards, and the pass deserves more thought than any single trick afterward.

• Ship dangerous spade honors, the Ace, King, or the Queen herself, unless you hold enough low spades to guard them; two or three usually do it.
• Create a void. Passing away a short suit entirely means that when it is led you can throw the Queen, or a fat heart, instead of following.
• Keep low cards in every suit you retain. A hand of nothing but honors wins tricks whether you like it or not, and in Hearts winning tricks is mostly how you get hurt.
• Do not reflexively pass low hearts; late in a round they are escape hatches.

Reading the middle of a round

You must follow the led suit while you can, so control comes from low cards that follow without winning. Count as you go: how many hearts have surfaced, whether the Queen is out, who showed void in what. The third round of any suit is the dangerous one, because that is when players with voids start dumping points on it; win it only with a card low enough to be safe. Sometimes taking a trick on purpose is right. Winning a cheap, pointless trick early buys the lead while leading is still safe, letting you push low spades through before the pressure builds. What you never want is to win a late trick with the last high card of a dying suit while hearts rain down on it.

Shooting the moon, and stopping it

One reversal flips the scoring on its head. Take all thirteen hearts plus the Queen and, instead of 26 penalty points, you score zero and everyone else takes 26. Moon hands have a recognizable look: a long, strong suit to run, top hearts rather than middling ones, and the high cards to keep the lead once seized. Middling hearts are the classic fatal flaw, since a single lost heart trick ends the attempt and leaves you holding everything you gathered. Defense is a shared duty. The moment one player starts winning every point trick, somebody has to take a heart, however unnatural it feels; eating one or two points to deny 26 is the best trade in the game. The match runs until someone reaches 100, lowest total wins, so a single made or blocked moon can decide the whole evening.

An evasion game with a long memory

Hearts belongs to the old family of trick-avoidance games, where winning tricks hurts instead of helping. Its ancestor Reversis was fashionable in France and Spain in the 1600s; the recognizably modern American game appears in the 1880s, and the version with the Queen of Spades penalty, originally called Black Lady, took over early in the twentieth century. What made Hearts a household name, though, was software: a version shipped with Microsoft Windows from 1992 on, and a generation of office workers learned the pass, the duck, and the moon on company time. The four-player game you are playing here against three computer opponents is that same standard form, and the computer players duck, count, and watch for moons, so the old advice applies at full strength.