Spades is a fun and exciting card game that people all around the world love to play. The game uses a standard 52-card deck and requires smart planning, guessing and teamwork. This guide will help you learn all the important parts, rules and ways to play the game well. After reading this, you'll be ready and confident to enjoy playing Spades.
Setting Up the Game
- Players: Spades requires four players, pairing up into two fixed partnerships. Teammates should sit across from each other to maintain a flow of play between alternating competitors.
- Deck: Use a normal set of 52 cards. Each suit has cards ranked from highest to lowest, starting with Ace, King, Queen and so on, down to the number two. Jokers are not used in this game.
Objective
- The main goal in Spades is to work with your partner to win tricks (rounds) and earn points. Together, you try to win the number of tricks you guessed.
Dealing the Cards
- Cards are dealt one at a time, clockwise, giving each player 13 cards.
- In each game, there are several rounds. The role of the dealer rotates clockwise each round, ensuring that each player gets a turn to deal the cards.
Bidding
- After looking at their cards, players guess how many tricks they think they and their partner will win together. This guess is called a bid.
- Starting with the player to the left of the dealer, everyone takes turns bidding in a clockwise direction, continuing until everyone has made a bid.
- A player has the option to bid Nil, indicating they won't win any tricks in the game. Successfully doing this awards their team an extra 100 points. However, if they fail, their team loses 100 points.
Playing the Game
- Starting a trick: Each trick begins with the first player putting down a card. The person sitting left of the dealer goes first. Spades are special cards that you can't use to start a trick unless Spades have been broken in a previous trick, or if a player only has Spades left in their hand.
- Playing the Same Suit: Everyone needs to play a card of the same suit that the first player put down, as long as they have one. This is called following suit.
Winning a Trick
- The highest card of the starting suit usually wins the trick. But if there's a Spade, then the highest Spade wins instead.
- The trick’s winner starts the next one.
Scoring: Tracking Progress and Victory
- If a team reaches or goes beyond their bid, they get points. They earn 10 points for each trick they guessed they’d win and they get extra points, called bags, for additional tricks won. But, if a team gets 10 bags, they lose 100 points and this penalty is cumulative.
- If a team doesn’t reach their bid, they lose points. The points lost are ten times the number they bid.
Winning the Game
- The game of Spades is won by the first team to reach 500 points. This ends the game and that team is declared the winner.