Here we are in January of a new year.
If there is one thing that tends to hold true for many of us in January it is a lack of extra cash for games, coming on the heels of the money sink of Christmas giving.
So I thought I might give the game budget a bit of a reprieve for readers this month and concentrate on vintage card games some may have overlooked over the years, or simply gotten away from playing so these reviews might rekindle some interest.
The first offering is a trick-taking game, generally played by four which dates back to around 1850, although the actual game creator is unknown.
Hearts uses a standard 52 card deck, with the cards in each suit ranking as usual from ace (high) down to two (low). There is no trump suit.
Each heart is worth one penalty point and the queen of spades is worth 13 penalty points. The other cards have no value.
As you can gather, the goal here is to avoid taking tricks with those nasty hearts and the especially evil queen of spades, or more generally to avoid scoring points. The game is ended by someone reaching or going over 100 points, and the winner is the player with the lowest score at this point.
A 100-point game can take a while, so you can lower that to fit the time you have.
For each hand all the cards are dealt so that everyone has 13.
On the first hand, after the deal, each player passes any three cards face-down to the player to their left. When passing cards, you must first select the cards to be passed and place them face-down, ready to be picked up by the receiving player; only then may you pick up the cards passed to you, look at them and add them to your hand.
This is of course where you pile all the hearts and pass them off, hoping the ones you pick up are at least lower in value.
On the second hand each player passes three cards to the player to their right, in the same way. On the third hand each player passes three cards to the player sitting opposite. On the fourth hand no cards are passed at all. The cycle then repeats until the end of the game.
This way no one player is constantly affecting the same player every hand.
To start playing cards the person who holds the two of clubs must lead it to the first trick. The other players, in clockwise order, must play a card of the suit which was led if possible. If they do not have a card of that suit, they may play any card. The person who played the highest card of the suit led wins the trick and leads to the next trick.
This is where you hope you are short-suited in something and can start dumping your hearts to tricks, but it is illegal to lead a heart until after a heart has been played to a previous trick, unless your hand contains nothing but hearts. Discarding a heart, thus allowing hearts to be led in future, is called breaking hearts.
For a bit of flavour, discarding a penalty card on a trick is called painting the trick.
Players are permitted to lead spades to any trick after the first. In fact it is a normal tactic to lead lower spades to try to drive out the queen. This is sometimes known as smoking out the queen.
As you might also expect, there are lots of variations on the rules for Hearts, some are popular house rules, others more broadly based so as to become regionally accepted. The key is to make sure everyone at the table is on the same page rules-wise and go from there.
As an interesting example, any people play that the Jack of Diamonds (or sometimes the Ten of Diamonds) is a bonus card, counting minus 10 points for the person taking it. With this form of scoring, the game is known as Omnibus Hearts.
There is of course more jargon to the game too. ‘Shooting the sun’ as an example, is taking all the tricks (as opposed to taking all points). Some score this as 52 points with the scoring handled in the same as shooting the moon.
For some people, reaching certain scores has a special effect. For example if your score is exactly 100 points at the end of a hand, it is reduced to 50 (or zero).
If a player reaches or exceeds 100 points and there is a tie for low score, additional hands may be played until there is a clear winner.
While there are many trick-taking games out there Hearts has some interesting concepts at play which make it well worth exploring.
