How to Play Spades

Spades is a card game for four players in two teams of two, with partners sitting across the table from each other. Before each hand, every player says how many tricks they expect to win (a trick is one round where each player puts down a card and the best card takes all four). A team scores only if the two partners win at least that many between them. Spades always beat the other three suits. Below are the full rules, a hand counted card by card so you can see where a bid comes from, what a nil bid is, and a short game scored hand by hand.

Spades Rules in Short

How to Play Spades With 4 People

Spades started in the United States in the 1930s, and the spades rules for 4 players below are the standard ones, as listed on Pagat's Spades rules page. You need a normal 52-card deck with the jokers taken out. In every suit the ace is high and the 2 is low: A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.

Sit so that partners face each other. If you're North, your partner is South, and the other team is East and West. One player deals the cards one at a time, clockwise, starting with the player on their left, until the deck runs out. Each player gets 13 cards, so the whole deck is used in every hand.

The deal moves one seat to the left after each hand. The player on the dealer's left always bids first and plays the first card of the hand.

What a Trick Is in Spades

A trick is one round of play: each player puts down one card, going clockwise, and the best card wins all four. The player who plays the first card of a trick leads it. Whoever wins a trick stacks the four cards face down in front of them and leads the next one. A hand has 13 tricks, one for each card you hold.

There are three rules for playing a trick:

• Follow suit. The suit of the first card is the led suit. If you have a card of that suit, you must play one. If you don't, you can play any card.
• Spades are trump. Trump means a suit that beats all the others. The 2 of spades beats the ace of hearts. When two spades are played, the higher one wins.
• Otherwise, the highest card of the led suit wins. A card from a third suit can't win, however high it is.

You can't lead a spade until spades are broken, which happens the first time anyone plays a spade. That's usually a player who is out of the led suit and plays a spade on it. If your hand has nothing but spades left, you can lead one anyway.

The last example is the one new players get wrong. You could have played a spade there, but your partner's ace was already winning. Playing a spade on that trick gains your team nothing and uses up a card that could win a later trick.

How to Bid in Spades

After the deal, each player bids once, going clockwise from the dealer's left. A bid is the number of tricks you think you'll win, from 0 to 13. Nobody passes, nobody has to bid higher than the player before, and a bid can't be changed once it's made.

Your bid and your partner's bid add up to your team's target. If you bid 3 and your partner bids 4, your team needs 7 tricks, and it doesn't matter which of you wins them.

To count a bid, give each card in your hand the share of a trick it's likely to win. Foony's bots count with fixed values, which make a good starting point:

• A spade ace is 1 trick, a spade king is 0.9, and a spade queen is 0.6.
• Each spade past your third adds 0.9. Once the other players have no spades left, your extra ones usually win.
• An ace in another suit is 1. A king is 0.7 if you have another card in its suit, and 0.4 if it's alone. A queen is 0.25 when you hold at least 3 cards of its suit.
• With 3 or more spades, a suit you have no cards in adds 1, and a suit with a single card adds 0.5. Once those cards are gone, you can win that suit's tricks with a spade.

Add the values up and round to the nearest whole number. Here's one hand counted that way:

On Foony, if your turn timer runs out while you're bidding, your bid is set to this count, so your partner isn't left with a random number.

What Is Nil in Spades

A nil bid is a bid of zero, a promise to win no tricks at all in the hand. If you keep it, your team gets 100 points. If you win even one trick, your team loses 100.

A nil is scored on its own. Your partner still has to make their own bid, and any trick you win doesn't count toward it. Each trick a nil bidder wins does count as a bag for the team, worth 1 point like any other extra trick.

When your partner bids nil, your job changes. Lead your high cards early so your partner can play their high cards on tricks you're already winning, and beat your partner's card whenever they're about to win a trick. When you bid nil, get rid of your highest cards on tricks that someone else is already winning.

Foony's Skilled and Expert bots only bid nil with a hand that has no aces or kings, at most 2 spades, and no spade higher than the 9. Some groups also play blind nil, which you bid before looking at your cards. Foony doesn't have it, and it's covered with the other house rules below.

How to Score Spades

Spades scoring happens once per hand, after all 13 tricks:

• Bid made. Your team won at least as many tricks as it bid. You score 10 points per trick bid, plus 1 point for each extra trick.
• Bid missed. Your team won fewer tricks than it bid, which is called being set. You lose 10 points per trick bid, even if you were only one short.
• Nil. Plus 100 if the nil bidder won no tricks, minus 100 if they won any.
• Bags. Each extra trick is a bag, and bags carry over from hand to hand. When your team reaches 10, you lose 100 points and the count drops by 10.

The bag penalty is there so teams don't bid low on purpose. A team that bids 2 with a hand worth 6 makes its bid easily, but it also picks up 4 bags, and a few hands like that cost 100 points.

Step through a short game below. Your team is you and your partner. Their team is the players on your left and right.

A game usually goes to 500 points, and some groups play to 200 for a shorter game (Bicycle's Spades rules mention both). You have to reach the target while ahead. If both teams pass it in the same hand, the higher score wins, and if the scores are tied, you play another hand. On Foony the target is 300 by default, and the host can pick 100, 200, 300, or 500.

Blind Nil, Jokers, and Other House Rules

Groups change the rules of Spades a lot. These are the house rules you're most likely to meet, and what Foony does for each one.

Playing With Fewer Than Four

With two or three people, play cutthroat, where everyone bids and scores alone. In Cutthroat Spades on Foony, 2 to 6 people can play. With 2 players each gets 13 cards, and with 3 each gets 17. Bidding, nil, and bags work the same way.

Play Spades Online

You can try all of this in a free game of Spades on Foony, with friends or against bots. In a solo room you get a bot partner and two bot opponents, and there are four bot levels: Easy, Casual, Skilled, and Expert. Each turn has a 20-second timer by default, and the table shows each team's score as you play, plus its bag count once it has any.