Hearts

Setup

Hearts is played with a standard 52-card deck with the jokers removed and aces being high.

To start, the cards are shuffled and evenly dealt out, face-down, to each player. Players look at their cards and select three to pass face down to the player on their left (alternatively, you can pass right, straight across or not at all).

Play

For the first trick, the player with the 2♣ of clubs leads off and plays that card. For subsequent tricks, the player who took the previous trick leads off by playing any card that they want.

Everyone else must then play a card in the same suit (or another suit if they are void in the played suit). The person who played the highest card in the suit wins the trick.

It is illegal to lead off a trick by playing a ♡ heart until a heart has been played in a previous trick. If the only cards in your hand are hearts, then you can also lead off with a heart after declaring that you are void in everything else.

Scoring

At the end of a game, players look through the tricks that they took and tally up their points. Score 1 point for every ♡ heart and 13 points for the Queen♠ of Spades. If someone manages to collect all 26 points, this is called "Shooting the Moon" and that player gets to subtract 26 points from their score instead. Scores are cumulated over several games played in sequence until someone reaches 100 points. At that point, the player with the least amount of points is the winner.