About Hearts on This Site
Twenty-six points nobody wants
Thirteen hearts worth a point apiece, and one queen of spades worth thirteen on her own — a single card carrying the same weight as an entire suit. You take the South seat against three computer opponents, follow suit while you can, and try to be holding the smallest total when somebody finally crosses a hundred. Everything about the game is avoidance, which makes it the rare trick-taker where winning a trick is usually the mistake.
The moon is the whole reason to play
Take all twenty-six and the scoring inverts: everybody else eats them instead. Shooting the moon is why Hearts survives as a game rather than a chore, and it is also the thing a weak computer opponent gets embarrassingly wrong, either walking into a shoot it should have seen coming or attempting one from a hand that could never support it. The difficulty setting here changes how the seats reason about danger cards and about whether a shoot is live, not how fast they play or how much of your hand they are allowed to peek at. On hard, they will duck a heart to stop you.
Five pages around the table
- Shooting the MoonWhen the hand supports it, and how to bail out halfway.
- Hearts Score CalculatorTotal a live four-player game, shoots and all.
- Hearts RulesThe pass, the two of clubs lead, and breaking hearts.
- Hearts StrategyVoiding suits, flushing the queen, and counting what has gone.
The variations page handles Black Maria, Omnibus and the passing rotations households argue about.
Who publishes playhearts.net
The site is operated by Card Games Studio, an independent studio of a few people who build free browser card games and keep the writing that goes with them. Around two dozen sites carry our name, including the ones recommended at the foot of this page, and we would rather state the connection than have you wonder about it — the studio page is the full inventory. Hearts generates more accusations of cheating than any other game we run, almost always after a hard-mode seat dumps the queen at exactly the wrong moment. If you think you have caught the AI seeing cards it should not, hello@coffeebreak.gg will get you a straight answer.