How to Play Spades: Rules for Beginners

What do you need to play spades?

Spades is a card game for four people playing as two teams of two. Partners sit across from each other, so every other seat at the table is on your side. You use a regular 52-card deck, and every player gets 13 cards.

Cards rank the way you'd expect: ace is high, then king, queen, jack, 10, and on down to the 2. The big idea is right there in the name. Spades are trump, which means any spade beats any card from the other three suits. A little 2 of spades will take down the ace of hearts. Hold onto that thought, baby. The whole game turns on it.

The goal is for your team to reach the target score first. On Spades Arena, a game is played to 250 or 500 points.

How does a hand of spades work?

Every hand has three steps:

• Deal: each player gets 13 cards.
• Bid: each player says how many books they think they can win.
• Play: everybody plays one card at a time until all 13 books are won.

A book is one round where each player puts down one card. Some folks call it a trick. Same thing. There are 13 books in every hand, because each of you starts with 13 cards.

When the hand is over, each team scores it, the cards get shuffled and dealt again, and you keep going until somebody wins the game.

How do you win a book in spades?

Whoever leads puts down any card they like, with one exception we'll get to in a second. Then everybody else, going around the table, has to follow suit. If a heart was led, you must play a heart if you have one.

If you don't have any of the suit that was led, you can play anything you want. That's your chance to play a spade and cut in.

Who wins the book? If nobody played a spade, the highest card of the suit that was led wins. If somebody played a spade, the highest spade wins. Whoever wins the book leads the next one.

Now, that exception. You can't lead a spade until spades have been broken. Spades get broken the first time somebody plays a spade because they couldn't follow suit. After that, anybody can lead spades. This rule keeps the person holding a fistful of spades from running the table right out of the gate.

There's one way around it: if spades are all you have left in your hand, you may lead one, even if spades haven't been broken yet. Nobody's going to make you sit there with nothing to play.

Here's one book, played around the table:

How does bidding work in spades?

Before anyone plays a card, each player looks at their hand and bids: the number of books they think they'll win. Then you and your partner add your bids together. That total is your team's contract, the number of books your team has promised to take.

Say you bid 4 and your partner bids 3. Your contract is 7. It doesn't matter which one of you wins them. You just need 7 between you.

What makes a good bid? Aces and high spades are your best friends. An ace in another suit often wins a book. In a regular game, the ace of spades always does. A long run of spades helps too, because those spades can cut in once other players run out of a suit. Counting your hand gets easier every time you play.

You can also bid zero. That's called nil, and it means you're promising to win no books at all. It's bold, it's fun, and it's worth a lot, as you'll see next.

How does scoring work in spades?

At the end of the hand, each team counts the books it won and checks them against its contract.

• Make your contract: you get 10 points for every book you bid, plus 1 point for each extra book.
• Fall short: your team is set, and you lose 10 points for every book you bid.
• Extra books are called bags. They look like free points, but every 10 bags costs your team 100 points. So bid honest!

Example: your team bids 7 and wins 8 books. You score 70 for the contract plus 1 for the bag, so 71 points. The other team bid 6 but only got the other 5 books. They're set, and they lose 60.

Nil is scored on its own. If you bid nil and win no books, your team gets 100 points. If you win even one book, your team loses 100. And any books a nil bidder wins never count toward the partner's bid. They're just bags.

Two more things you'll hear about:

• A Boston is when one team wins all 13 books in a hand. Bragging rights for a week.
• The mercy rule: on Spades Arena, a team that falls to -200 or below loses the game.

What are jokers and deuces in spades?

Plenty of families play with house rules, and Spades Arena lets you pick one of three when you set up a game. The first is the standard game. The other two are variations:

• No Jokers (standard): the ace of spades is the boss card.
• Big Joker, Little Joker (variation): two jokers join the deck. Big Joker beats Little Joker, and Little Joker beats the ace of spades.
• Joker, Joker, Deuce (variation): Big Joker, then Little Joker, then the 2 of spades, then the ace of spades.

When jokers are in, the 2 of hearts and 2 of diamonds come out, so the deck stays at 52 cards. The jokers count as spades, so they follow all the same rules as any other spade.

Some families also play blind nil, where you bid nil before you look at your cards, usually for 200 points if you make it and minus 200 if you don't. That's a house-rule variation, and Spades Arena doesn't offer it yet.

Ready to try it? Play a free practice table

Reading about spades is one thing. Feeling your little 3 of spades steal a book off an ace is something else. The best way to learn is to sit down and play a few hands.

Start a free practice table against the computer at spadesarena.com. Computer players are always labeled as computers, so you know exactly who you're playing. Take your time, make your mistakes, and bid nil once just to see how it feels. When you're ready, bring your partner to a private table.

Spades Arena is free to play, and nothing you can buy helps you win.