Hearts Basics

Hearts is a trick-based game for 3–7 players. A trick refers to the cards played by all players on a single turn, with the highest card played winning the trick.

The basic goal of hearts is to not win points—players win points by taking tricks that contain one or more hearts, or by winning the trick that contains the queen of spades. The player who wins the fewest points over several rounds of play is the winner. Though simple to learn, hearts involves complex strategy. It’s a social game, enjoyable at all levels of play from beginner to seasoned expert.

Hearts evolved from an 18th-century Spanish card game called reverse. As in hearts, the goal in reverse was to avoid winning tricks that contained certain cards. Another predecessor of hearts was four jacks, in which the object was to avoid winning any jacks. These earlier games assigned negative point values to cards, a practice that gave way to the simpler, positive scoring system used in hearts.

Around 1850, hearts became more popular than reverse, four jacks, and all other games that encouraged players to avoid taking tricks. This popularity has continued up to the present day, in large part because, unlike many other trick-based games, hearts is played by individuals instead of teams. Consequently, hearts is considered an exciting, cutthroat game.