Hearts free instant card game app for iPhone and iPad

Hearts is an "evasion-type" trick-taking playing card game for four players, although variations can accommodate 3–6 players.


The game is also known as Black Lady, The Dirty, Dark Lady, Slippery Anne, Chase the Lady, Crubs, Black Queen and Black Maria,though any of these may refer to the similar but differently-scored game Black Lady.

The game is a member of the Whist family of trick-taking games (which also includes Bridge and Spades), but the game is unique among Whist variants in that it is an evasion-type game; players avoid winning certain penalty cards in tricks, usually by avoiding winning tricks altogether.


These are the rules we have used for Hearts. There are many variations possible, but we use the basic ones from Wikipedia.

The objective of Hearts is to get as few points as possible. Each heart gives one penalty point. There is also one special card, the Queen of spades, which gives 13 penalty points.

When the game starts you select 3 cards to pass to one of your opponents. Typically you want to pass your three worst cards to get rid of them. Which opponent you pass to varies, you start by passing to the opponent on your left, then in the next game you pass to the opponent on your right, third game you pass across the table and in the fourth game there is no card passing.

Each turn starts with one player playing a single card, also called leading. The suit of that card determines the suit of the trick. The other players then play one card each. If they have a card in the same suit as the first card then they must play that. If they dont then they can play one of their other cards. Once four cards have been played, the player who played the highest ranking card in the original suit takes the trick, i.e. he takes the four cards on the table and he then starts the next turn. Any penalty cards in the trick (hearts or queen of spades) are added to the players penalty score. So you want to avoid taking any tricks that have hearts or the queen of spades.

The player who has the two of clubs at the start of the game leads in the first hand, and he MUST lead with the two of clubs.

You cannot lead a trick with hearts, until hearts has been broken (played on another suit). So if it is your turn to lead and no heart has been played yet then you may not select a heart as the card to play first. In some variations of the game you cant play the queen of spades until hearts has been broken as well, but in this version you can always play the queen of spades and she doesnt break hearts.

In the very first round you may never play a heart or the queen of spades, not even if you dont have any card in the suit of the lead card.

Once all cards have been played the penalty points are counted and the player with the fewest points wins that hand.

Shooting the Moon! Generally its bad to get penalty cards, but there is one extra twist! If you get ALL the penalty cards (13 hearts + Queen of spades) then you get 0 points and the other 3 players get 26 points each! This is called Shooting the Moon. Trying this can be a really risky move though, since if another player gets just one of the hearts youll end up with a lot of points...