From the First Deal to the Final Score · A Complete Beginner's Guide
Spades is a trick-taking card game for four players in two partnerships, played with a standard fifty-two card deck in which spades are always trump. It takes five minutes to learn and a lifetime to argue about. This page teaches the whole game, in order, the way you would learn it at a kitchen table.
Read it once and you are ready to play. Nothing else required.
Five minutes, if you would rather be shown than told.
“How to Play Spades (Quick Guide)” by Callum's Cards, used by embed. Not a Spadesinator production. The player loads only when you press play; until then this is a still image, and no cookies are set.
Four players sit around a table in two teams of two, partners seated across from each other. Each hand, every player receives thirteen cards, predicts how many tricks they will win, and then the table plays out all thirteen tricks. Your team scores points for making its combined prediction and loses points for missing it. The first team to reach the target score, traditionally 500 for a long game or 300 for a single evening, wins.
The one thing that makes spades spades: the spade suit is always trump. Any spade beats any card of any other suit. There is no auction over the trump suit as in bridge and no turned-up card as in euchre. The name of the game is the rule of the game.
The dealer shuffles and deals the entire deck one card at a time, clockwise, starting with the player to their left. Everyone ends up with thirteen cards. The deal passes one seat to the left after every hand, so the small advantages of position rotate around the table.
Cards rank as you would expect: ace high, then king, queen, jack, ten, on down to the two. Some tables add jokers above the ace of spades; that is a house variant, and the House Rules Ledger covers it. This primer teaches the standard deck.
Starting left of the dealer and moving clockwise, each player looks at their hand and declares how many of the thirteen tricks they expect to win. There is no second round of bidding and no passing. Your bid and your partner's bid add together into a single team contract: if you bid 3 and your partner bids 4, your team must win at least seven tricks.
Counting a hand is the first skill of the game. The quick arithmetic most players use:
A bid of zero is called nil, and it is a contract of its own: you are promising to win no tricks at all this hand. Succeed and your team collects a bonus, usually 100 points. Win even a single trick and the bonus becomes a penalty of the same size. Your partner still has to chase their own bid while covering you, which is why a good nil hand is one full of low cards and why a good partner plays high over your every card.
Some tables also allow blind nil, a nil declared before looking at your cards, for double the stakes. Most houses reserve it for a team trailing badly, as a comeback weapon.
The player to the dealer's left leads the first trick with any card except a spade. Play moves clockwise, and each player must play a card of the suit that was led if they have one. That obligation, following suit, is the spine of every trick-taking game, and breaking it has a name and a punishment: a renege, and at a serious table it costs the offending team three tricks.
If you have no card of the led suit, play anything you like. Play a spade and you are trumping the trick: the highest spade played wins it, no matter how grand the other cards were. If no spade is played, the highest card of the led suit wins. The winner of each trick collects the cards, sets them face down in front of their team, and leads the next trick.
Spades cannot be led until they have been broken, which happens the first time somebody trumps a trick because they could not follow suit. Until that moment, every lead must come from the side suits, which keeps the trump suit coiled and dangerous instead of spent in the first three tricks. One exception is universal: a player whose hand is nothing but spades may lead them, because they have no other legal card.
Make your team's combined bid and you score ten points for every trick bid. Bid seven, take seven, score seventy. Fall short and you are set: the same seventy comes off your score instead. Every trick you win beyond your bid scores just one point and is called a bag, and bags are not a bonus. They are a debt.
When a team collects its tenth bag, the penalty lands: 100 points off, and the bag count starts over. This is the sandbag rule, and it exists to punish teams that bid low on purpose and scoop up cheap tricks. Underbid a little and you are prudent. Underbid all night and the tenth bag sends the bill.
A made nil adds its bonus on top of whatever the partner's bid earned. A failed nil subtracts it. Houses differ on whether a failed nil bidder's tricks count toward the partner's bid or count as bags; Spadesinator lets the table decide.
Hands are played until a team reaches the target score. Five hundred is the number the old rule cards printed; three hundred fits a single evening, and it is the Spadesinator default. If both teams cross the line on the same hand, the higher total wins. Some tables end the game on the spot if a team wins all thirteen tricks in one hand, a feat called a Boston, and this house honors it with the ceremony it deserves.
The vocabulary that gets you through your first night.
Trick · One round of four cards, one from each player. Thirteen per hand. At many tables, especially Black American tables where much of the game's living tradition was built, a trick is called a book. Same thing, your table's word.
Trump · The suit that beats all others. In spades, always spades.
Following suit · Playing a card of the suit that was led. Mandatory when you can.
Renege · Failing to follow suit when you could have. The oldest crime in the whist family; Edmond Hoyle was ruling on it in 1742. Spadesinator catches it automatically.
Breaking spades · The first time a spade is played on a non-spade lead. Before that, spades cannot be led.
Cutting · Trumping a trick with a spade because you could not follow suit.
Nil · A bid of zero tricks, worth a bonus made and a penalty failed. Blind nil is the same promise made before looking at your cards, for double stakes.
Set · What happens to a team that misses its bid. The points you would have won come off your score instead.
Bag · A trick won beyond your bid, worth one point now and trouble later. Ten of them cost 100. Also called a sandbag.
Board · A house minimum for the team bid, commonly four. Nobody hides under the table.
Boston · Winning all thirteen tricks in one hand. The rarest sight in spades.
Cutthroat · Spades without partners, every player for themselves. This primer teaches the partnership game.
Reading gets you the rules. Repetition gets you the instincts.
Every good spades player got that way the same unglamorous way: by playing a great many hands and slowly noticing what keeps happening. When to lead trump. When your partner's bid of four is really a three. What a hand that can go nil looks like before you have counted it. None of that arrives from a page. It arrives from repetition, and the only thing standing between most new players and that repetition is needing three other people who are free tonight and patient enough to teach.
That is the part this site removes. Sit down alone and the empty chairs fill with AI players immediately, so a hand is always available: on a lunch break, at midnight, for five minutes or two hours. The built-in engine is free and plays every rule on this page. Play twenty hands in a week and the counting starts happening without you deciding to do it.
The real reason people stall out learning spades is not the rules. It is that a live table is an unforgiving classroom. Renege once, bag your partner twice, and you will hear about it, which is a fine tradition among people who have played together for twenty years and a miserable first night for everyone else.
An AI table has no such memory of your dignity. Misplay a hand and the next one deals. The AI characters do talk during a game, because a silent table is not much of a spades table, but table talk is one switch in the game settings: turn AI Banter off and the room goes quiet while you work something out. Nobody sighs. Nobody explains your own mistake back to you. Turn it on again when you want the company.
Practice is only useful while the opposition is still teaching you something. The house characters play a serious game, and when the ordinary table stops being a fight you can seat an Expert shark in any chair, one at a time or all three at once. Change the house rules while you are at it: add jokers, switch on sandbag penalties, raise the target score. The same thirteen tricks feel like a different game, which is the point.
Reading teaches the rules. The table teaches the game. Play spades online free against AI opponents that play to win, or deal in your friends with a room code. No download, first hand in under a minute.
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