Spades

Players

2-4 players (best with 4)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Trick-taking

Setup

Spades is a four-player partnership game. Partners sit opposite each other so that the two sides alternate around the table. Use a 52-card pack with the jokers taken out. Cards rank ace high down to 2 low in every suit, and spades are permanently trump. Nothing is turned or named to decide the trump suit; it is spades in every hand of every game.

Choose the first dealer by cutting, high card taking the deal, and move the deal one seat to the left after each hand. The dealer shuffles, offers a cut to the player on their right, then deals the whole pack out one card at a time clockwise starting with the player on their left, so everyone finishes with 13 cards. Each hand is therefore 13 tricks.

Set up the score sheet before you start. You need one column per partnership for points and, next to each, a small separate running tally of bags. The bag count carries across the entire game rather than resetting each hand, and forgetting to track it is the single most common way a Spades game goes wrong.

Play

Bidding comes first and takes exactly one round. Beginning left of the dealer and going clockwise, everyone reads their hand and says how many tricks they think it is worth — any figure from 0 to 13. Bids do not have to increase, nobody may pass, and once a number is said it stands. You may not describe your hand or ask your partner anything, but every bid is public, so the last player to bid knows a great deal more than the first. The two partners' bids are added together into a single contract for the side: bids of 4 and 3 mean that partnership must take at least 7 tricks. Some groups impose a minimum team contract of 4, so check the house rule before you deal.

A bid of 0 is nil, a declaration that you personally will win no tricks whatsoever. Your partner bids normally and their number alone becomes the side's trick contract. Nil is scored separately and can succeed or fail independently of whether that contract is made.

A blind nil is committed to sight unseen, so it has to be called out the moment the deal ends, before you fan your cards. Most tables allow it only to a side trailing by 100 points or more. Bidding then proceeds normally around the table, and once the last bid has been made, with nobody yet having led, the blind bidder slides two cards face down to their partner and takes back two that the partner sends over face down in return. That trade exists so the bidder can dump two likely winners and pick up junk, leaving the partner to carry the extra strength.

The first trick is led by whoever sits to the dealer's left, and it may not be opened with a spade. Play continues clockwise. You must follow the suit led if you can; if you are void you may play any card at all, including a spade. Spades are permanent trumps: any spade beats every plain card, and the highest spade in a trick takes it. A trick nobody spaded goes to the highest card of the led suit. A card of some third suit never wins. Whoever takes a trick opens the following one.

Nobody may open a trick with a spade until the suit is broken, which happens once some spade has fallen on a trick led in another suit, whether that was a deliberate ruff or a helpless discard. The one exception is a player holding nothing but spades, who may lead one. Nothing stops you trumping in the first time you are void; that is normally how spades get broken.

Following suit is compulsory, but neither account read for this entry sets any penalty for failing to. Since a side that quietly reneges can break an opponent's nil or steal a contract, agree beforehand what happens — the usual answers are that the offending side is set for the hand or that it hands over three tricks — and agree too that the correction only stands while the hand is live.

Everyone keeps their side's tricks together where both partnerships can count them. When the thirteenth trick is finished, count the tricks each side took and score the hand, then pass the deal to the left.

Goal & scoring

The first partnership to 500 points wins.

Make the contract and it pays 10 a trick — counted on what you bid, not on what you took — with anything over that worth 1 apiece. Those extras are bags, also called sandbags, and the single point each one pays now is really a loan against a penalty later. Bid 7 and take 9 and you score 72: seventy for the contract and two for the bags.

A side that falls short is set and loses 10 points per trick bid, with no credit at all for the tricks it did win. Bid 7 and take 6 and you lose 70. One of the two accounts here scores a broken contract as simply nothing rather than as a loss, on a simpler form of the game that has no nil bid either, so it is worth saying which you are playing.

Bags accumulate for the whole game in their own tally. The moment a side reaches 10 bags, 100 points are deducted from that side's score and 10 comes off the bag count, leaving any surplus in place to start the next batch. Games are routinely decided by a sandbag penalty rather than by anything that happened in a trick, which is why deliberately underbidding a strong hand is a losing habit.

Bring a nil home and the partnership banks 100, with the partner's contract settled separately on its own merits. Win a single trick and that same 100 goes the other way as a loss. Where the nil was blind, both figures double to 200. What becomes of the tricks a broken nil bidder collected is the detail worth pinning down beforehand: at most tables they are dead weight, useless toward the partner's contract yet still totted up in the side's bag tally, while other groups treat them as ordinary tricks and credit them to the contract.

Play continues until a side is at 500 or more at the end of a hand. If both sides cross in the same hand, the higher total wins, and a genuine tie is broken by playing one more hand.

Variants

Cutthroat (Solo) Spades — Partnerships are abolished and all four players bid and score for themselves. One account adds the rule that makes it a different game rather than the same one alone: you must beat the highest card played to the trick so far if you can, and that includes playing a spade when you are void in the suit led, so ducking is not available to you. Three-handed is described separately and has its own deal.

Suicide Spades — Exactly one member of each side must bid nil on every hand, and the partner bids normally and carries the trick contract alone — held, under the same account's minimum-bid rule, to at least 4. Scores swing enormously and the game becomes almost entirely about protecting a partner's nil.

Mirror — Bidding judgement is removed altogether: you must bid the number of spades in your hand, whatever that is. A player dealt no spades therefore bids nil, and has no choice about it. The whole game shifts onto the play of the cards. The same source lists the idea being applied to other suits — bid your diamonds instead — as a further step.

Jokers and high deuces — Both jokers join the pack as the two highest trumps, the big joker above the little joker, and the twos of clubs and hearts come out so the deal still comes to 13 each. Where the accounts differ is what happens to the two deuces left in the pack. In the plain form only the two of spades is promoted, making it the third highest trump, so the order runs big joker, little joker, two of spades, then the ace of spades on down to the three. A New York form promotes the two of diamonds as well and puts it ABOVE the two of spades, and counts it as a spade for following suit. Settle which of those you are playing before the first deal rather than mid-trick.

Two-handed Spades — There is no deal. The pack lies face down midway between the two, and the draw alternates. Every turn takes two cards off the stock and keeps exactly one. Look at the top card. Take it into your hand and the next card is yours to see and then throw away face down; leave it and it goes face down out of play, and the one underneath is yours to keep. Either way two cards leave the stock and one joins your hand, so the stock empties with 13 held and 13 discarded by each player. Bidding, play and scoring are then as in the bigger game.

Three-handed Spades — No partnerships, and a deal of its own: 17 cards each, and the one card left over is simply set aside for that game. Do not take a card out to make it come out even — the two of clubs has a job. It has to be led to the first trick by whoever holds it, the three of clubs standing in on the rare occasion the two is the discarded card, and the other two players must follow with a club if they have one. A player with no club may take the trick with a spade or throw a card of another suit to refuse it. Add the two jokers as the highest trumps of all and the pack is 54, which deals 18 each instead.

• classic
• counting
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Trickster Cards, VIP Spades, Spades.co, DKM Games, MPL Games.