How to play Spades

Spades is a partnership trick-taking game for four, played with a standard 52-card deck and no jokers. The two players sitting opposite each other are partners and share a single score. Aces are high, twos are low, and the spade suit is permanently trump.

The deal

The whole deck is dealt out, thirteen cards to each player, one at a time. There is no kitty, no talon and nothing turned up: every card is in somebody's hand from the start, which is why counting what has gone is worth so much here. The deal passes one seat clockwise after every hand.

The auction

Starting with the player to the dealer's left and going clockwise, each player states the number of tricks they expect to take. There is no passing, no doubling and no second round — you say a number once and you live with it.

The two numbers from one partnership are added together to make its contract. The partnership needs that many tricks between them; it does not matter which partner takes which. A partnership that bids four and three needs seven tricks, and one player taking all seven is the same as four and three.

Thirteen tricks exist, so the four bids very rarely total thirteen. When they total less — which is usual — the surplus tricks have to go somewhere, and that is where bags come from.

Following suit and trumping

The player to the dealer's left leads to the first trick. Each player in clockwise order must follow the suit led if they hold a card in it. A player with none of the led suit may play absolutely anything, including a spade.

The trick goes to the highest spade played. If nobody played a spade, it goes to the highest card of the suit that was led — a card of any other suit cannot win a trick it was not led to, however high it is. The winner of a trick leads to the next one.

Breaking spades

Spades may not be LED until they have been broken. Spades are broken the moment anybody plays one on a trick led in another suit, whether they did it to win the trick or because they had nothing else. Once broken, they stay broken for the rest of the hand.

There is one exception, and it is the one people get wrong: a player whose remaining cards are all spades may lead a spade even though nobody has broken them. They have no legal alternative, and leading it breaks them.

The restriction applies to leading only. Trumping in when you are void in the suit led is always legal, from the first trick onwards.

Scoring the hand

A partnership that takes at least as many tricks as its contract scores ten points for each trick it bid. Every trick beyond the contract is worth one point and is recorded as a bag.

A partnership that takes fewer tricks than its contract is set: it loses ten points for each trick it bid, and the tricks it did take score nothing at all. Being set for a contract of six costs sixty points whether you took five tricks or none.

Bags accumulate across the whole game rather than being settled each hand. The moment a partnership's bag count reaches ten, it loses 100 points and ten bags are removed from the count — so an eleventh bag leaves one on the books, still climbing toward the next hundred.

Nil

A bid of zero is a nil. It is a separate wager from the partnership's contract: a nil adds nothing to the contract, and the partner's bid stands alone as the number they have to make between them.

A nil that takes no trick scores 100. A nil that takes even one trick loses 100, and the trick still counts toward the partnership's total for the purpose of making the contract and collecting bags. So a failed nil is often two disasters at once — a hundred gone and the partner's contract quietly turned into an overtrick.

Both members of a partnership may bid nil, in which case the contract is zero and every trick they take is a bag.

Vocabulary

A **contract** is a partnership's two bids added together. A **bag** is a trick taken beyond the contract. To be **set** is to miss the contract. To **cover** a nil is to take tricks off your nil-bidding partner on purpose. **Breaking** spades is playing the first one on another suit's lead.

Ending the game

The game ends when a hand finishes with a partnership on 500 points or more, and the higher score wins. If both partnerships cross 500 in the same hand, the higher score still wins. If they are exactly level on or above 500, the game is not over and another hand is played.

Scores can and do go negative. A partnership that is set twice and pays a bag penalty can be a long way below zero and still win, because a single well-bid hand with a made nil swings more than 200 points.