Hearts (card game)

Hearts

An evasion-type trick-taking game for 3-6 players
The Hearts penalty cards; the object of Hearts is to avoid taking tricks containing any of these cards; if a player takes all of them they have "shot the moon"
Origin	Polignac, Reversis, Four Jacks
Alternative names	The Dirty, Black Lady, Dark Lady, Black Swear, Chase the Lady, Crubs, Rickety Kate, Queen of Spades (in Turkey), Black Queen (in India), Black Cat (in Hungary)
Type	Trick-taking
Players	3–6, (4 is best)
Skills required	Card counting, Tactics, Teamwork
Cards	52-card (51 or 54 for 3 or 6 players, 50 for 5)
Deck	Anglo-American
Play	Clockwise
Card rank (highest to lowest)	A K Q J 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2, no trump
Playing time	5 minutes per hand
Random chance	Low – moderate
Related games
Black Lady
Notes: Hearts, while not trump, award one penalty point each, hence the game's most common name.

Hearts is an "evasion-type" trick-taking playing card game for four players, although variations can accommodate 3–6 players. The game is also known as Black Lady,Black Maria, Black Widow, and Slippery Bitch, though any of these may refer to the similar but differently-scored game Black Lady. The game is a member of the Whist family of trick-taking games (which also includes Bridge and Spades), but the game is unique among Whist variants in that it is an evasion-type game; players avoid winning certain penalty cards in tricks, usually by avoiding winning tricks altogether.

The game of Hearts as currently known originated with a family of related games called Reversis, which became popular around 1750 in Spain. In this game, a penalty point was awarded for each trick won, plus additional points for capturing the Jack of Hearts or the Queen of Hearts. A similar game called "Four Jacks" centered around avoiding any trick containing a Jack, which were worth one penalty point, and the Jack of Spades worth two.

Over time, additional penalty cards were added to Reversis, and around 1850, the game gave way to a simple variant of Hearts, where each Heart was worth 1 point. The Queen of Spades (sometimes referred to as "Calamity Jane") was introduced in a variant called Black Maria which then became known as the standard Hearts game, and soon thereafter, the idea of "shooting the moon" was introduced to the game to add depth to the gameplay. In the 1920s, the Jack of Diamonds variation (ten positive points) was introduced, and some time later the scoring was reversed so that penalty points were expressed as positive instead of negative. Passing cards, breaking Hearts, leading the Two of Clubs, and "Shooting the Foot," whereby a player attempts to Shoot the Moon, but succeeds in taking the Queen and all but one heart, are more recent additions.

The game has become popular in live play among grade school students in Canada, and has increased in popularity through Internet gaming sites. In many parts of the world it became known through the Microsoft version of the game packaged with most 1990s versions of its Windows operating system, beginning in version 3.11.