Hearts - The Classic Trick-Taking Card Game, Free Online for 3-6 Players

import {PointsChart, TrickExplorer} from '~/posts/explainers/hearts'; export const strings = { pointsChart: { title: "What Costs You Points", heartsLabel: "Every heart · 1 point", heartsNote: "All thirteen hearts, from the deuce to the ace. Rank makes no difference to the cost, only to how likely the card is to win a trick you did not want.", queenLabel: "Queen of spades · 13 points", queenNote: "One card worth half the deal on her own. Players call her the Black Lady, and most of a game of Hearts is spent working out who is about to be handed her.", totalNote: "Thirteen hearts plus the queen make 26 points in every deal, and they all land on somebody. Your job is to make sure it is not you.", }, trickExplorer: { title: "Try It: Who Pays for This Trick?", intro: "A heart was led, so you have to follow with a heart. Someone has already thrown the queen of spades in, because they could not follow either. Click the card you would play:", placeholder: "The verdict appears here. One of these three cards is very expensive.", onTable: "On the table", yourHand: "Your hearts", costLabel: "You take {{points}} points", notes: { kh: "The king is the highest heart on the table, so you win the trick and everything sitting in it: three hearts and the queen of spades. That is 16 points in one go, and you played the trick perfectly legally. This is the whole game in one click.", "7h": "The nine of hearts is still the highest heart, so the player who led it takes the trick and all 16 points. You paid nothing. Throwing a card that loses on purpose is called ducking, and it is most of what good play looks like.", "3h": "Same result as the seven, and it is the better card to spend. The three was never going to win a trick you wanted, so getting rid of it now keeps the seven for later, when you may need something that still loses safely.", }, }, };

Hearts Online

Foony Hearts is a free online hearts card game for three to six players, with invite-link rooms for friends, four bot difficulty levels, and a table that tracks every point as it lands so you always know where you stand. It plays the full classic rule set: the three-card pass that rotates each deal, the forced opening lead, hearts locked until they are broken, and shooting the moon. Games run to 50, 100, or 150 points, and the player with the lowest score wins.

Hearts belongs to a family of European trick-avoidance games that goes back to the 1700s, and it reached most people in the English-speaking world through a much more recent route: it shipped with Windows for over two decades. The rules are documented on Wikipedia's hearts page. What has kept it alive is the shape of the game. You are not trying to win. You are trying to make somebody else win, at exactly the wrong moment.

Play Hearts Online with Friends or Against Bots

Make a room, send the link, and anyone can join in seconds from any browser on desktop or mobile. Hosting a room needs a free account, but the people you invite can play as guests with nothing to install and no email to confirm.

The host sets the table in the lobby. Play to 50 for a short game, the traditional 100, or 150 for a long one, with a turn timer from 5 to 60 seconds or none at all. Tables seat 3 to 6 players, and the deck adjusts so it always deals evenly: three players get 17 cards each with the two of diamonds removed, four players get the classic 13, five get 10, and six get 8. The 26 points never change, so a bigger table just means shorter deals and more of them.

Solo play runs against Easy, Casual, Skilled, or Expert bots, and every tier is available from your first game. Expert ducks tricks properly, sheds its high spades before the queen can catch them, and dumps points the moment it is void in a suit. The host picks one difficulty and every bot at the table plays at it. Solo games earn less XP than games against people, scaled to the difficulty you chose.

A room holds up to 100 people. Anyone beyond the seats queues behind one and takes turns round-robin, so a big group can all stay at the same table.

How to Play Hearts

Everyone is dealt an equal hand. Before a card is played you choose three cards to pass, and everyone passes at the same time, so you are giving away three cards without knowing what is arriving. The direction rotates: left on the first deal, right on the second, across on the third, and on the fourth nobody passes at all and you play the hand you were dealt.

The player holding the lowest club must lead it, and no points may be played on that first trick. After that, play goes around one card at a time. You must follow the suit that was led if you can. If you cannot, you may play anything, and that is exactly when players get rid of their most dangerous cards. There is no trump suit in Hearts, so a card of any other suit simply cannot win: the highest card of the suit that was led takes the trick.

The trick's winner takes every point card sitting in it, whoever played them. That one rule is what makes the game, and it catches every new player once:

One more rule and you have the whole game. Hearts may not be led until a heart has been discarded on some other suit's trick, which players call breaking hearts. Until that happens the suit is locked, and the table shows you when it opens up.

Shooting the Moon

Taking points is bad, right up until you take all of them. If one player collects all thirteen hearts and the queen of spades in a single deal, the score flips: they take 0 and every other player is charged the full 26. That is shooting the moon, and it is why a player who has already eaten several hearts is the most dangerous person at the table rather than the safest.

It also changes how you defend. If somebody is clearly running away with the hearts, the correct play is often to deliberately take one, because a single point in your pile is far cheaper than the 26 you get charged if they finish the job. Foony tracks the moon automatically and stamps it on the table when it lands.

Room Settings

Two settings change how a room plays. Play to sets the score that ends the game, at 50, 100, or 150. Jack of diamonds turns on the rule often called Omnibus, which makes that one card worth -10 points to whoever takes it. It is a bigger change than it sounds: suddenly one trick in the deal is worth chasing instead of ducking, a diamond lead becomes a real decision, and a player who is behind has a way back. It is off by default, and there is a preset for it in the room list.

Hearts Strategy

Pass your high spades first. The ace and king of spades have no way to avoid capturing the queen if she is led at them, so they are the most expensive cards in your hand even though they are worth nothing themselves. Passing them is the single highest-value habit in the game.

Get short in a suit if you can. Being void is what lets you throw the queen or a fistful of hearts onto somebody else's trick, and the pass is your one chance to engineer it. Two cards of a suit are usually worth breaking up. Four are not.

Duck with your highest loser. When you cannot win a trick, play the biggest card that still loses rather than your smallest. A card you keep is a card you have to play later, and low cards are what keep you safe at the end of a deal when everyone is out of options.

Count the queen. Until she has been played, every spade you hold above her is a liability and every spade lead is somebody fishing for her. Once she is gone the whole suit is safe again, and the shape of the deal changes.

Watch for the moon. If one player has taken every heart so far, stop optimising your own score and take a trick.

Leaderboards and Achievements

Every match feeds the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and all-time Hearts leaderboards. The eight Hearts achievements cover the game's real moments: Table Manners for finishing your first match, Clean Sheet for a deal where you take nothing at all, Dodged the Lady for winning without ever eating the queen of spades, Diamond Hunter for chasing the jack across three deals under the Omnibus rule, Under Ten for finishing a full table on ten points or fewer, Comeback Kid for winning after trailing by 40, Shoot the Moon for taking all 26, and Twice in a Blue Moon for doing that twice in one game.

Winners and losers both collect Foony coins and account XP from every deal, and that progress follows you into every other game on the site. Winning just pays better.

Hearts vs Spades

The two most played trick-taking games in the English-speaking world are near opposites. In Foony Spades you predict how many tricks you will take before a single card is played, spades beat everything, and taking tricks is the whole point. In Hearts there is no bidding and no trump suit, and tricks are the thing you are trying to avoid. That makes Hearts the easier of the two to pick up: you only need to follow suit and dodge points, and the judgement comes with practice rather than up front. It also makes it the meaner game, because every card you play is aimed at a specific person.