How to Play Spades

The aim of a hand

A hand contains 13 tricks. Before the first card is played, each player says how many tricks they expect to take. That prediction is a bid. Make your bid to score strongly; take too few and you lose points.

The winner of a trick leads the next one. After all 13 tricks, every player scores their own result. The dealer moves one seat and the next hand begins. A game ends when one player is the unique leader at 500 points or more after scoring a complete hand.

How a trick works

The player who leads chooses a card. The suit of that card is the led suit. If you hold a card in the led suit, you must play one of those cards. If you do not, you may discard any suit or play a spade.

Spades are trump. Any spade beats every card in the led suit, and the highest spade wins. If no one plays a spade, the highest card in the led suit wins. You never have to beat a card and you never have to play a spade when you cannot follow suit.

When you can lead spades

Spades cannot lead a trick until they are broken. They break when a player who cannot follow suit uses a spade to trump a trick. Once broken, anyone can lead a spade on a later trick.

There is one exception: if your hand contains only spades, you may lead one even when spades have not been broken. This rule stops the game from forcing an impossible lead.

What happens at the table

The player to the dealer’s left makes the first bid and leads the first trick. The table follows that order clockwise. Your hand is arranged by suit so the legal options are easy to see, and you play a legal card with one click or tap.

There are no teams in this version of Spades. Alex, Jamie, and Riley are individual computer opponents, so every bid, trick, bag, and score belongs to one player.

• 52 cards, four players, and 13 tricks per hand.
• No jokers and no blind nil.
• Follow suit whenever you can.
• Highest spade wins; otherwise, highest card in the led suit wins.