Spades

Game rules

Spades is a popular game originating in the United States, invented around the 1930s, and is played with a standard 52 cards deck. The objective is to win at least and as exactly as possible the number of tricks announced at the beginning of the round. It is traditionally played with 4 players in teams of 2 (partnership spades), but can also be played with 3, 5 or 6 players individually.

Dealing and bidding

At the beginning of the round, the dealer deals all cards evenly to the players. With 3 players, one of the 2s is removed so that everyone gets 17 cards (51 cards in total); with 5 players two 2s are removed (10 cards each, for a total of 50), and with 6 players all the 2s are removed (8 cards each for a total of 48).

Once the dealing is over, each player announces on their turn the number of tricks they think they will take during the round. Each bid is independent of the others, there is no need to bid more than previous bids and passing isn't allowed. Each player must announce a number between 0 and 17, 13, 10 and 8 respectively depending on the number of players. When playing in teams, the teammates' bids are summed up to make a single total bid for the team.

Playing the hand

Playing the hand follows a classic schema: the player next to the dealer starts the first trick with the card of their choice; it is won by the player who played the highest card in the trump suit, or in the base suit if there is no trump, then the player who won the trick starts the next one. The trump suit is always spades, it never changes color (hence the name of the game).

Card order has no special particularity, ace is the strongest and 2 the weakest, at trump as well as at non-trump. The winner of the trick is the player who played the highest spades card, or the highest card of the base suit if there are no spades.

Scoring

At the end of the round, players score depending on the number of tricks announced and actually won. If playing in teams, tricks bid by the individual players of a team are summed up.

Voluntarily picking sandbags can be an interesting strategy short term to make your opponents fail their contracts, but can be very penalizing long term if accumulating too many! Managing your number of bags not to take too many and not too few is an essential point of strategy in the game of Spades.

A game is generally played to 500 points, sometimes 1000, 1500 or 2000 for longer ones.

Specialties and bonuses

Nil or zero bid

Announcing 0 tricks is a special kind of bid. For the contract to be successful, you mustn't take any tricks, one or more mean a failure. A success gives 100 points, and a failure -100.

When playing in teams, the partner of the nil bidder is alone to make the tricks they announced themselves. Their teammate must absolutely do everything so that the nill bidder doesn't win any tricks, by adopting a cover strategy. The plus or minus 100 points are counted separately from those for the non-nil bidder, the latter being normally scored. In case the nil bidder fails their contract, the tricks they took aren't counted in favor of the partner but are still counted as bags.

Here are some examples assuming that you bid 0 and your teammate 4:

Double nil or double zero

The double nil or double 0 occurs when the two partners of the same team both bid 0 tricks. In that case, each of them independently from the other can win or lose 100 points plus the possible bags. The total gain can therefore be +200 or -200.

Bidding and winning exactly 1 or 2 tricks

Bidding and exactly winning one or two tricks isn't as easy as it appears to be. When playing with 3 or 4 players, successfully bidding and exactly winning 1 or 2 tricks gives 20 bonus points. A successful but non-exact contract gives no bonus and is counted as usual. Hence, bidding 2 tricks and making 3 gives 21 points.

This bonus doesn't apply when playing with 5 or 6 players, because the more players there are, the easier it is for that case to happen.

Bonus for difficult contract

To encourage big and risky bids, a bonus of 10 points is given per trick announced and won beyond the tenth, the seventh, the sixth and the fifth respectively depending on the number of players. For example, with 4 players, announcing 10 tricks and taking 11 gives a bonus of 40 points for a total of 141 instead of 101.

Variants

No hell

In this mode, it is forbidden for the total number of tricks announced to be exactly equal to the number of tricks in a round.
At least one player or one team thus must either fail or take sandbags.

For example, with 4 players, the sum of all announcements must be different from 13. If the first three players announced 3, 4 and 3 tricks respectively, then the last player isn't allowed to bid 3 (he can bid 2 or 4 but not 3).

Quicksand

This variant changes how points are counted:

Suicide

In this variant, a player must bid at least 4 tricks while the other must go nil.
At least one player from each team must go nil. It is possible to play double nil. Points are counted as in normal game.

Keyboard shortcuts summary