Hearts
A trick-taking game you are trying to LOSE, for 3–6 players.
At a glance
A standard 52 cards. Every heart is worth one penalty point and the queen of spades is worth 13, so there are 26 points in every hand.
Take as few points as possible. The lowest score wins, which is the opposite of most games and catches people out for the first hand or two.
Before each hand you pass three cards — left, then right, then across, then a hand where nobody passes at all, and repeat.
Whoever holds the 2♣ leads it. You must follow suit if you can. Hearts cannot be led until one has been played on another suit.
Take all 26 points and the hand flips: you score nothing and everyone else takes 26. Miss by a single point and you simply take 25, which is the worst hand in the game.
Hands are dealt until somebody crosses the target — 100 by default. The player with the LOWEST score then wins. A tie at the bottom keeps the game going.
Dealing to three, five or six
Hearts is at its best with four, and it works with more or fewer — but the deck has to come out even, so a card or two is removed first.
Four players: the whole 52, thirteen each.
Three players: take out the 2♦. Seventeen each.
Five players: take out the 2♦ and the 2♣. Ten each. Whoever holds the 3♣ leads, since the 2♣ is gone.
Six players: most tables switch to Cancellation Hearts with two decks shuffled together, where identical cards played to the same trick cancel each other out.
The passing rotation changes with the count too, and Casetta Cards follows it: with three players there is nobody across, so the cycle is left, right, hold.
Omnibus, and the other ways people play
Omnibus — the version with the jack of diamonds as a bonus card, worth −10 to whoever takes it. It is the variation this app offers under "Jack of diamonds scores −10", and it is worth knowing the name because half the tables that play it call it that.
Black Maria is the British three-handed form.
No points on the first trick — some tables forbid discarding a heart or the queen to the opening trick.
The queen breaks hearts — some play that the Q♠ opens hearts up in the same way a discarded heart does.
Shooting the sun is taking every single trick, not merely every point. Worth 52 by the same mechanism as the moon, and rare enough that most players never see one.
How Hearts scoring works
Hearts is a trick-taking game you are trying to lose. Every heart you collect is worth one penalty point, and the queen of spades is worth thirteen. That is 26 points in every hand, and they always go somewhere.
The game ends when somebody crosses 100, and the winner is the player with the fewest points. Which makes Hearts unusual: the scoreboard counts up, and you want to be at the bottom of it.
Because the total is fixed, a hand that does not add up to 26 has been recorded wrong — Casetta Cards refuses it rather than letting a mistake follow you to the end of the game.
Shooting the moon
Take all 26 points — every heart and the queen — and the scoring inverts: you score nothing and everyone else takes 26. It is the one aggressive move in a game otherwise spent avoiding things.
It is also all or nothing. Twenty-five points is not a near miss; it is simply a catastrophic hand. Which is why an attempt usually ends with one other player quietly taking a single heart to stop it.
Some tables let the shooter subtract 26 from their own score instead, which matters when they are already near 100. Both are common; agree before you start.
The pass
Before each hand, every player passes three cards. The direction rotates: left, right, across, then a hand with no pass at all, and repeat.
The no-pass hand is the one people forget. It changes the game completely — you play what you were dealt, and the usual trick of unloading the queen on somebody else is unavailable.
Common disputes, settled
Can I lead a heart? Not until hearts are "broken" — until somebody has discarded one because they could not follow suit. The exception is a player holding nothing but hearts.
Is the queen of spades a heart? No, but she counts for points and, at most tables, breaks hearts when played.
Who leads the first trick? Whoever holds the two of clubs, and they must lead it.
Do the points always total 26? Always. If your hand does not, somebody has miscounted.
Keeping score without the arithmetic
Hearts is easy to score and easy to score wrong: thirteen hearts, a queen worth thirteen, and a moon shot that flips the whole hand on its head. Casetta Cards checks that every hand totals 26, handles a moon shot correctly for the whole table, and tracks who is closest to ending the game. Free, in a browser, with no account needed to start.
Variations
All off unless you turn them on when starting a game.
100 points — The usual target. Expect eight to twelve hands.
200 points — A long evening. Plenty of room to recover from one bad hand.
You subtract 26 — Kinder to the table and harsher on the leader — your own score drops by 26 instead.