How to play Spades

Spades is a trick-taking game for exactly four players in two partnerships. Partners sit opposite each other, so the turn order alternates between the teams. A standard 52-card deck, thirteen cards each, no jokers in the common version.

Spades are always trump

This is the whole game in one sentence. Spades beat every other suit, always, no bidding for it and no changing it. The two of spades beats the ace of hearts.

Which means a suit you have run out of stops being a weakness and becomes a weapon: once you have no hearts left, every heart trick is one you can take with a spade.

Bidding

Before any card is played, each player says how many of the thirteen tricks they think they can win. Your team's contract is the two bids added together.

Bids are made in turn, so the last player to speak has the most information — which is why who deals matters, since the deal decides who bids first.

Add all four bids and you get the board. If the board is under thirteen there are loose tricks going spare. If it is over thirteen, at least one team is going to miss their bid.

Playing the hand

The player to the dealer's left leads the first trick. After that, whoever won the last trick leads the next.

- You must follow suit if you can. Failing to when you could is a *renege*, and it is the one real offence in the game. - If you cannot follow suit, play anything, including a spade. - Highest card of the suit led wins — unless somebody played a spade, in which case the highest spade wins.

Most houses do not let you *lead* a spade until spades have been "broken" — that is, until somebody has played one because they were out of the suit led.

Scoring

Make your contract and you score ten points per trick bid. Bid six, take six or more, score sixty.

Miss it and you are set: minus ten per trick bid. Bid six, take five, lose sixty. Note it is the bid that is punished, not the shortfall — missing by one costs the same as missing by five.

Bags

Tricks you take *beyond* your bid are bags, worth one point each. That sounds free, and it is the trap. Accumulate ten bags and most houses dock you a hundred points, with the count carrying over rather than resetting.

Bags are why you can win nearly every trick at the table and still lose the night, and why bidding low to stay safe — *sandbagging* — does not work.

Nil

Bidding nil means "I will take zero tricks". Make it and your team gets a hundred. Take a single trick and you lose a hundred. Your partner bids normally and now has to spend the hand protecting you, taking tricks you might otherwise be forced to win.

Blind nil is nil declared before you look at your cards, usually worth two hundred either way, and usually only allowed when you are well behind. It is less a bid than a coin flip you chose to take.

Where house rules differ

There is no universal Spades rulebook, and these are the places two tables will disagree. Settle them before the first deal.

- What happens to a failed nil's tricks. Some houses charge them to the team as bags, some let them count toward the partner's contract, some ignore them. This one changes whether a contract was made at all, not just the bag count. - The bag limit and penalty. Ten and minus a hundred is the most common, but five and minus fifty is played too. - Minimum team bid. Some houses insist a partnership bids at least four between them, so nobody can sit back and farm bags. - The target score. Five hundred is traditional. Three hundred keeps a night moving and makes every hand matter more. - Blind nil at all, and whether it needs a deficit. - The renege penalty. Usually three tricks or a flat hundred.

Writing them down where everyone can see is genuinely the standard advice. [Setting up a Spades night here](/play/spades) does that for you — the rules go on screen and lock when the first hand is dealt, so nothing can be rewritten after people have bid against it.