How to play Spades

Spades is the great partnership card game — four players, two teams, and the constant tension between bidding boldly and bidding safe. It rose from American card tables to become one of the most-played online card games in the world, and it's easy to see why: every hand starts with a gamble (how many tricks can we take?) and ends with the satisfaction, or the sting, of finding out. Here you and your partner take on three bots.

Goal

Be the first partnership to reach 500 points. You sit across from your partner; together you try to win exactly as many tricks as you bid.

Bidding

Each hand, every player bids the number of tricks they expect to win, from 0 to 13. Your team's bids are added together — that's your contract. A bid of Nil (zero) is a promise to win no tricks at all: pull it off for +100, fail for −100.

Playing tricks

• Spades are always trump. Follow the led suit if you can; if you can't, you may play a spade to win the trick (or throw off a loser).
• The highest spade played wins the trick; if no spades are played, the highest card of the led suit wins.
• You can't lead spades until they've been "broken" — played on an earlier trick by someone who couldn't follow suit.

Scoring & strategy

Make your contract and you score 10 points per bid trick. Miss it — take fewer tricks than you bid — and you lose 10 per bid trick, a painful "set". Every trick you take over your bid is a "bag": worth a single point now, but collect ten bags and you're docked 100, so don't overbid or grab tricks you don't need. Count your sure winners — aces and high spades — before you bid, support your partner's nil by covering the tricks they can't take, and save a high spade to capture the lead when it matters. Steady, accurate bidding wins far more games than greed.