Hearts

Finding your way around the table

You sit at the bottom of the screen. West is on your left, North faces you and East is on your right, and play always travels in that order: you, West, North, East. Each opponent’s name shows how many cards they still hold, with their running score in the little pill beside it.

Along the top, the You pill is your own total and the Hand pill counts how far into the game you are. The hand number decides where your pass goes. The circular arrow wipes the scores and starts a brand new game.

When it is your turn, every card you are allowed to play wears a thin green outline. If a card has no outline, the rules forbid it right now, and tapping it does nothing.

A hand from your chair

Picture hand 3, the across pass, so your three cards go to North. You hold the Ace and King of hearts, the Queen of spades with only the 6 for company, and a long run of clubs topped by the Ace. With so little spade cover the Queen will be hard to hide when spades come round, so she travels across with the two big hearts. North sends you three cards back, and only then do you plan.

North holds the 2 of clubs and leads it. East follows low, and now you have a gift: on the first trick nobody may throw a heart or the Queen unless that is all they hold, so this trick is all but guaranteed to be clean. You drop the Ace of clubs and let a dangerous high card disappear for free.

Later East shows out of clubs. From that point every club trick is a possible landing spot for points, so when clubs are led again you play your smallest club and let somebody else hold the lead.

What the computer players tend to do

West, North and East follow simple, steady habits. They only ever see their own cards and the cards already on the table, so nothing about your hand is visible to them.

• When they follow suit, they play the highest card that still loses to the card on top. If they cannot get under it, they play their lowest card in the suit.
• If they play last to a trick with no points in it and hold nothing that would lose, they take it with their highest card of that suit. Given a card that loses, they still duck.
• From the second trick on, a player out of the suit led throws the Queen of spades first. If they do not hold her, they dump their highest heart, and with no hearts either they shed their highest card.
• When they lead, they start with a low card and their choice is weighted away from point cards.
• Their passes reach first for the top three spades, the Queen and the two cards above her, then for big hearts, so expect spade trouble in the cards you receive.

Reading the bots and steering the tricks

The ducking habit is predictable enough to plan around. Each bot looks at the highest card of the led suit already on the trick and slips under it if it can. A bot that can’t usually plays its lowest card in the suit, and one sitting last on a pointless trick grabs it with its top card. So a 3 of diamonds reliably hands the lead over. It only wins if nobody can play a higher diamond, which is exactly when the Queen or big hearts get thrown onto it, so use it early while diamonds are plentiful.

That same habit makes your big spades risky to show. Put the King on a spade trick and a bot holding the Queen will slide her straight under it, since she is its tallest spade below the King. Put the Ace down and she usually follows too, unless that bot also has the King and plays that instead. Show a top spade before her owner has played and expect to collect 13.

Keep an eye on discards as well: a suit someone has shown out of is the suit the Queen and big hearts will arrive in.

Thinking in whole games, not single hands

Thirteen hearts at a point apiece plus the Queen’s 13 means 26 points go out every single hand, and the first hand that leaves anybody on 100 or more is the last one. The smallest total takes the game, and finishing level at the bottom still counts as your win.

Read the scoreboard before each hand. Say you sit on 58 and East is on 88. Twelve more points for East ends the game with you comfortably ahead, which makes East the perfect home for the Queen. Now flip it: if you are the one sitting on 97 while the others are in the fifties, a stray three hearts ends the game with you last, so take nothing at all if you can help it.

Then there is the moon, which turns the scoreboard upside down. Picture yourself on 70 with the other three in the high seventies. Sweep up all 26 points in one hand and the game hands those 26 to each of them instead, so all three sail past 100 while you stay on 70 and win. Miss a single heart, though, and the points stay yours.

Little habits worth building

Small things that save points every game.

• Use the hold hand. Every fourth hand has no pass, so you live with the cards you are dealt.
• Count the spades that have fallen. Once the Ace and King are gone, a low spade is much safer to hold.
• Only an actual heart opens the suit for leading. The Queen landing on a trick changes nothing about what can be led.
• Save at least one very low card in each long suit as your way out of the lead late in the hand.

Questions about Hearts