Spades is a young game with an old family. It was invented in the United States in the 1930s, most likely in the Midwest, as a faster and simpler relative of whist and bridge: fixed trumps, a bid per player, no dummy hand and no auction. Nobody knows who dealt the first hand. What we do know is what happened next.

Photo: U.S. Navy, National Archives

From the Barracks to the Kitchen Table

The Second World War made spades. A game that needs only one deck, four people and no scoring pad more complicated than a napkin was perfect for barracks, troop ships and long waits, and millions of American soldiers learned it there. After the war they brought it home, and from the 1950s onward spades settled into college dormitories, family gatherings and, above all, the kitchen tables of Black American families, where it became something closer to a tradition than a pastime. Ask around at a cookout in Atlanta or Chicago and you will find people who learned the game before they learned to ride a bike, and who will tell you with some feeling that reneging is unforgivable.

That is also why spades has so many house rules. It was never owned by a company or governed by a federation; it was passed on from person to person, and every family kept its own variant. Jokers as the top trumps, a minimum bid of four per team, ten for two hundred, a bonus for a Boston: all of these are real spades, just not the same spades.

Spades Goes Online

Spades reached the computer late, well after solitaire and hearts. The turning point was the late 1990s, when Yahoo! Games and MSN Gaming Zone put free online spades rooms in front of millions of people at once. For the first time you could find three other players at three in the morning, and for a lot of people that is where they learned the game. Those rooms are gone now, but the players are not: spades is still one of the most searched card games in the United States, and the reason a site like Spades.net exists.

About This Site

Spades.net has been around for years, and for most of that time it ran an old game engine that annoyed people, us included. Players wrote in about a rule that forced them to follow the wrong suit, about partners who trumped their own nil and about opponents who bid like they had never seen a deck of cards. In 2026 we rebuilt the whole game from scratch: a new rules engine that has been checked against an independent referee over tens of thousands of simulated games, five levels of computer players that count cards and think ahead, and a table that fits any screen. The old emails were the specification. If you find something that still doesn't feel right, the contact form is open.

A Few Things Worth Knowing

• Being dealt all thirteen spades in one hand is a 1 in 635 billion chance. Strictly speaking every other specific hand is just as unlikely; the spades are simply the one you would remember. If it ever happens to you, bid thirteen: you cannot lose a single trick.
• The suit has nothing to do with digging. The English word comes from spada, the old Spanish and Italian word for sword; swords are still the suit's name in Spanish and Italian decks. The French and Germans call it a pike.
• The ace of spades became the decorated card in a deck because of a British tax. From 1712 the tax stamp went on the ace of spades, and from 1765 the government printed the card itself, with an elaborate design to stop forgers. The tax ended in 1960; the fancy ace stayed.
• To “have something in spades” means to have a great deal of it, and comes from bridge, where spades is the highest-ranking suit. That is also where the game gets its idea that spades beat everything.
• Spades is almost purely American. Canada, the UK and Australia play it too, but under the same name; there is no country where the same game goes by a different one.

Enough reading. The table is at the top of the page, and there are three players waiting.

Play Spades now