Hearts is the rare card game built entirely around avoidance — you spend the whole hand trying not to win certain cards, which flips the usual logic of trick-taking on its head. It's easy to learn, brutal to master, and has been a staple of family game nights for well over a century.
How to Play Hearts
Hearts is typically played by four players with a standard 52-card deck, each dealt 13 cards. The goal is the opposite of most trick-taking games: avoid collecting penalty cards. Every heart is worth one penalty point, and the Queen of Spades — nicknamed "the Black Lady" — is worth 13 penalty points on her own.
Before play begins, each player passes three cards to an opponent (the direction rotates round to round), letting you offload dangerous cards. The player holding the 2 of Clubs leads the first trick, and players must follow the suit that was led if they can. Hearts and the Queen of Spades cannot be led until one of them has already been played in an earlier trick ("breaking hearts"), unless a player has nothing else in hand. Whoever plays the highest card of the suit led wins the trick and collects any penalty cards in it, then leads the next trick.
Play continues until all 13 cards are played, then penalty points are tallied. The game itself runs across multiple hands until a player crosses a target score, usually 100 — the player with the lowest total at that point wins. There's one famous exception: if a single player collects all 13 hearts and the Queen of Spades in one hand — "shooting the moon" — they instead score zero and every opponent takes 26 penalty points, turning a disastrous hand into the best possible outcome.
Good Hearts strategy is mostly about damage control: unloading dangerous high cards like the Ace and King of Spades early, tracking which suits opponents are void in so you don't feed them an easy trick, and knowing when a shoot-the-moon attempt is actually realistic versus a hand you'd be reckless to chase. Reading the table over several hands, not just the current one, is what separates strong Hearts players from lucky ones.
The History of Hearts
Hearts descends from a much older family of European trick-avoidance games. The earliest ancestor is generally traced to Reversis, a game recorded in Spain and France as far back as the early 1600s, where the entire point was to lose tricks and specific cards rather than win them — a genuinely unusual idea for a card game at the time.
The version recognizable as modern Hearts came together in the United States, first documented in the 1880s. An 1887 reference guide noted it had only been played for about five years at that point and guessed it was "probably of German origin," reflecting how quickly games mutated and spread before anyone tracked them formally. The game kept evolving from there: in 1909, the Queen of Spades was added as a major penalty card, creating the variant sometimes called "Black Lady," which is essentially the standard version played today. From its American parlor-game roots, Hearts spread internationally through the 20th century and became one of the default card games bundled with early personal computers, cementing it as a household name well beyond the physical card table.
That computer-era boost is worth dwelling on for a moment: Hearts was one of the handful of card games included free with early Windows operating systems, which meant an entire generation learned the rules not from a grandparent across the table but from a mouse and a monitor. It's a rare case of a 19th-century parlor game finding its biggest audience through a completely different medium a hundred years later — which makes it a fitting fit for a browser-based platform today.
Why Play Hearts on RivalPit
- Free and no download. Hearts runs instantly in your browser.
- Real-time multiplayer. Challenge a friend with a link, or play a solid CPU opponent.
- Points, never money. Every match is played for points and bragging rights — no betting, no wagering, no real-money stakes, ever.
- One of 100+ free games on RivalPit, with new games added every week.
Hearts is one of the anchors of our card game lineup, alongside Spades, Rummy 500, and Crazy Eights. Want to get a full table together? Our guide to playing games online with friends with no download covers exactly how.