Hearts Score Calculator
Keeping score in Hearts sounds trivial — count the hearts, add thirteen for the queen of spades — yet real games drift off the rails constantly. Someone forgets who captured the queen, a hand mysteriously adds to 24 points instead of 26, or a moon shot gets scored backwards and poisons every total after it. This calculator does the bookkeeping for a four-player table: it validates each hand, applies shoot-the-moon scoring automatically, and carries running totals until someone crosses 100.
Score the next hand
Enter the hearts each player captured and mark who took the queen of spades. The hand must account for all 26 penalty points before it can be added.
Enter hearts taken (0–13) for all four players.
How Hearts Scoring Works
Every deal of Hearts contains exactly 26 penalty points: thirteen hearts worth one point each, plus the queen of spades worth thirteen by herself. After the last of the 13 tricks, each player is charged for the point cards buried in the tricks they captured. Low is good — the player with the fewest points is winning, and clean tricks containing no hearts and no queen cost nothing at all.
Because the point supply is fixed, the four hand scores must always sum to 26. That invariant is the fastest error check available to a scorekeeper, and it is the one this calculator enforces before a hand can be recorded: the hearts entered for the four players must total thirteen, and exactly one player must be marked as capturing the queen of spades. If your paper scoresheet ever fails that test, a trick was misattributed somewhere.
Shooting the Moon
There is one glorious exception to the low-is-good rule. A player who captures all 26 penalty points in a single hand — every heart and the queen of spades — has shot the moon. Instead of being buried under 26 points, the shooter scores zero and each of the three opponents is charged 26. The calculator detects this automatically: whenever one player's raw hand comes to 26 points, it flips the scoring for you and tags the hand in the history table.
A successful moon is a 78-point swing in the standings, which is why it decides so many close matches — and why a failed attempt is so brutal. Collect 25 of the 26 points and you simply eat nearly the maximum penalty with no reward. Our shoot-the-moon guide covers which hands justify the gamble. Some tables let a successful shooter subtract 26 from their own total instead of adding 26 to everyone else; this calculator uses the standard add-to-opponents rule, the same one our online game applies.
Playing to 100
A Hearts match is a marathon of hands. Scores accumulate deal after deal, and the game ends the moment any player's total reaches or passes 100 points. Crucially, the player who triggers the finish almost never wins it: once the threshold is crossed, the lowest cumulative total takes the match. The running-total row below the hand history highlights anyone at or beyond 100 and announces the winner as soon as the match ends.
The 100-point ceiling shapes strategy in the late game. A player sitting at 95 must treat the queen of spades as a live grenade, while a player at 40 can afford to absorb a few hearts to steer her elsewhere. Watching the totals hand by hand — rather than tallying at the end of the night — is what turns scorekeeping into table talk.
Worked Example
Suppose a hand ends with you taking two hearts, West taking five hearts and the queen of spades, North taking six hearts, and East escaping clean. The check passes: 2 + 5 + 6 + 0 hearts makes thirteen, and one queen is assigned. The hand scores 2, 18, 6, and 0 — which sums to 26, as every legitimate Hearts hand must. Enter three or four hands like that and the totals table starts telling the real story of the match: who is drifting toward 100, and who still has room to gamble.
If your group scores the jack of diamonds as a 10-point bonus, you are playing the Omnibus variant — see the Hearts variations page for how it and other house rules change the math. This calculator sticks to classic scoring: hearts, the queen, the moon, and the race to 100.
Prefer to let the table do the math?
Our free online Hearts game scores every hand automatically, tracks the match to 100, and handles moon shots without an argument at the table.