The table, and how you win
Hearts is played by 4 seats: you at the bottom, CPU 1 to your left, CPU 2 across from you, and CPU 3 to your right. All three opponents are CPU — there is no online play and no local pass-and-play, and the seats are numbered rather than named because a seat is a direction, not a person.
The deck is a standard 52 cards with no trump suit. Fourteen of them carry points: every heart is worth 1 point and the queen of spades is worth 13, so a single hand always distributes exactly 26 points among the seats that took them. The other 38 cards exist only to be got rid of.
Each hand deals all 52 cards, 13 to a seat, so nobody ever draws from a stock and none is left over. There is no dealer and no choice of who leads first to make — the deal itself decides both.
- A match ends the moment a hand leaves any seat with 100 points or more, and the seat with the fewest points wins. With 4 seats at the table, ending level with another seat on the lowest score is a real result here — a draw — not the near-impossible tie a 2-player game would have.
- Your difficulty choice applies to the next match you start. A match already in progress keeps the opponents it began with, so switching CPU strength mid-match is not something you can do to a hand you are already partway through.
- There is no daily deal and nothing kept as a streak. Every match starts from a fresh, freshly-seeded deal, and the only thing you choose beforehand is how strong the three CPU seats play.
Passing three cards
Before most hands, you choose exactly 3 cards from your hand and pass them on. Two cards is not a pass, and the confirm button only lights up once you have picked the third.
The direction changes hand by hand, in a fixed 4-hand cycle: left, then right, then across, then a hand where nobody passes at all — and then it repeats. It runs off the hand number alone, so which direction is coming next is never a guess.
All 4 seats resolve their pass at once: the fourth seat to confirm moves all 12 cards across the table in a single beat, not one seat at a time. Resolving them together means nobody chooses their 3 cards already knowing what an earlier seat changed its hand to.
- Selecting and unselecting a card is not itself a move — it does not use up a turn, and a selection still in progress is kept if you leave and come back.
- The 3 CPU seats confirm their own passes while you are still choosing, so by the time you press the button, yours are the last 3 cards left to move.
Playing a trick
Once passing is done — or immediately, on the hand where nobody passes — the seat holding the 2♣ leads it, and only it: no other card is legal for the first card of a hand.
After that, the rule is simple: if you hold a card in the suit that was led, you must follow it. That is the one rule with no exception anywhere in the game — the rules below only ever apply to a seat that cannot follow suit.
On the first trick, point cards cannot be played — no heart and no Q♠ — unless a seat holds nothing else, in which case the rule bends rather than deadlocking the hand. A heart cannot lead a trick at all until one has already fallen in an earlier trick, and the one exception is a seat whose whole hand is hearts, which is allowed to lead one anyway.
- Playing a card is a two-tap confirmation: the first tap lifts it from your hand and the second plays it — the same two-step control the series uses whenever a hand of cards would make a single tap easy to fire by accident.
- A card the rules will not let you play right now sinks and stops responding to taps. There is no scolding sound or vibration for it — the game simply never treats an illegal tap as your move.
- Q♠ is not a heart, so it never breaks the hearts rule, and it can lead a trick at any time, including before any heart has fallen.
- A trick is won by the highest card of the suit that led it. There is no trump suit, so a card of a different suit cannot win no matter how high it is — a seat with none of the led suit is simply out of contention for that trick.
- Once all 4 seats have played, the trick does not clear itself: the 4 cards sit face-up for a moment before they are collected, so you see exactly what fell before the table moves on. The seat that won leads next, and a hand always runs the full 13 tricks, using all 52 cards.
CPU opponents and difficulty
The 3 CPU seats do not search ahead the way the board games in this series do — the heaviest thing any of them does is count the 13 cards it holds against what has already been played. There is no node budget to hit, because there is no search to hit it with.
Every CPU move lands after the same 450ms beat, one timer at a time: you play a card, the other 3 seats answer in turn, a completed trick is collected, and if a CPU seat won it the next lead simply continues. The timer never runs ahead of what is actually owed on the table.
What a CPU seat can see is deliberately limited: it knows its own hand, the cards that have actually been played, and its own difficulty — never another seat’s hand and never what any seat chose to pass. It also never remembers the 3 cards it passed away itself, once the exchange is done — a human expert would remember handing you the Q♠, and these three do not.
- Ties among equally good options are broken by the match’s seed rather than by anything closer to skill — the same saved match always resolves them the same way if you replay it.
- There is no unlimited-strength CPU here, and no depth beyond what the table above lists. Hard reasons about what it has actually seen; it does not calculate every card behind your hand.
| Difficulty | Passing | Leading and following |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | Values a card by rank alone, so it happily passes A♠ and K♠ | Always plays its highest card, whether leading or following |
| Normal | Passes the Q♠ first if it has it, then the cards that could catch it later | Leads low, ducks under a trick when it can, and takes as cheaply as possible when it must |
| Hard | Everything Normal does, plus passing away short suits to build a void | Everything Normal does, plus avoiding a suit where a seat is known void, and blocking a moon it can see coming |
All 3 difficulties watch for the moon the same way: once a single seat has taken 12 or more points and nobody else has taken any, the other seats stop feeding it point cards. Only Hard goes further and actively takes tricks away from a seat it looks like it is shooting the moon. None of the 3 CPU seats ever tries to shoot the moon itself — a CPU hunting the moon would be indistinguishable from 3 seats teaming up against you, and that is not a game Hearts is meant to become.
No Undo, no Hint — the help you actually get
There is no Undo in this game. Every board game in this series that offers Undo relies on both sides seeing the same position — Hearts is hidden information, and 3 replies come back before your turn comes round again. Taking your card back after seeing all 3 of them would let you keep what you learned — who was void in what, where the Q♠ went — while pretending the hand had not happened yet. Undo can take back a move; it cannot take back what you now know, so it is not built here.
There is no Hint either. What to pass, and when to duck or take, is the entire game, and suggesting a move would mean playing it for you. What you get instead is the rules made visible rather than a suggestion: every card the current rules allow you to play stays selectable, and every card they do not sinks and stops responding — the same way Checkers shows you which pieces can move.
- A card announced as blocked to a screen reader is a fact about that card right now, not advice about which of the rest to choose. Nothing tells you which legal card is the good one — legal cards all look and sound the same.
- There is no automatic sorting of your hand beyond the fixed suit-then-rank order it is already dealt in. Gin Rummy sorts a hand by meld because melds are the point there; following suit is about finding a suit, so a hand grouped by suit is the whole of what Hearts needs to show you.
- This one form of help — which cards the rules let you play — is free from the first launch, at every difficulty, with nothing behind an ad or a purchase.
Scoring, the moon, and the end of a match
Every heart taken in a trick costs the seat that took it 1 point, and the Q♠ costs 13 — 14 point cards in total, always adding up to exactly 26 points a hand. The other 38 cards are worth nothing; they exist only to be discarded onto tricks you lose.
Shooting the moon means one seat takes all 26 points in a single hand. When that happens, the other 3 seats each take 26 instead, and the seat that shot the moon takes none — there is no option to subtract 26 from your own score instead, because that choice would always be taken and would never actually decide anything.
Taking only the Q♠ for 13 points is not shooting the moon — it is half the hand’s points, not all of them, and the game scores it as an ordinary 13, not as a moon.
- A match ends the instant a hand leaves a seat with 100 points or more, and the seat with the fewest points at that moment wins. Results are read from your seat: you alone in the lead is a win, you level with another seat in the lead is a draw, and any seat below you means a loss — even one that beats every other CPU seat.
- Statistics are kept per difficulty: matches played, wins, losses and draws, plus your total time across all of them. There is no separate hand-by-hand tally, no best score, no streak, and no clock shown while you play — a hand you are partway through simply has 13 tricks left to run, not a countdown.
- Only a match that actually finishes counts. Abandon one partway through to start another and it is not recorded as a loss, though it was already counted as played the moment it began.
Tips
- Track voids as tricks fall. A seat that sloughs a wildly off-suit card at the first opportunity is telling you it holds none of that suit — remember it, because it decides who can safely take your Q♠ off your hands later.
- When you pass, get rid of the Q♠ if you hold it, and send your highest spades with it if you can — a hand with nothing above a 10 or so in spades is very hard for anyone to hang the queen on.
- Do not lead a heart or the Q♠ before you have to. Both are illegal on the first trick anyway, but the habit of holding them back matters on every trick after it too.
- A long, strong suit paired with a short void elsewhere is the shape a moon shot needs. If you see it in your own hand early, decide by the third or fourth trick whether you are actually going for it — backing out halfway just hands the other 3 seats the points anyway.
- If a CPU seat looks like it might be going for the moon — taking every point trick and showing nothing but hearts and high cards — hang onto one card in its strong suit if you can. Taking even a single trick away from it stops the moon and the 26-point swing that comes with it.
- Late in a hand, count what everyone has already shown rather than what they might still be holding. With most of the deck already played, working out the last few cards from what is left in each suit is often exact, not a guess.
There is no hand history to look back on once a hand is over — what you noticed while it was happening is what you keep, which is exactly why watching for voids as they appear matters more than trying to remember them afterward.
Questions people ask
Is there a timer or clock while I play?
No. Your match score and this hand’s score sit at the top of the screen the whole time, but there is no clock — play time is only recorded for your statistics, never shown while you’re playing.
Can I lose a match, and can it end in a draw?
Yes to both. A match ends once any seat reaches 100 points, and the seat with the fewest points wins — if that is not you, it is a loss, even against a CPU seat you personally beat. With 4 seats at the table, finishing level with another seat on the lowest score is a real result, and it counts as a draw rather than a win or a loss.
Is the playable-card help free, and is there a Hint that suggests moves?
The help is free, and there is no Hint. The only assistance Hearts gives is showing which cards the current rules let you play — every card that is not allowed simply stops responding — and it works from the first launch, at every difficulty, with nothing behind an ad or a purchase. It never suggests which of your legal cards is the good one.
Do I need an internet connection to play?
The Android app plays from the first launch with no connection: the deal, the rules and the CPU all live on your device, so there is nothing to download and no account to make. The browser version needs to load the page once, and then the game itself runs in your browser.
Does the CPU know my hand, or remember what I passed?
No. Each CPU seat only ever sees its own hand, the cards that have actually been played, and its own difficulty — never another seat’s hand, and never what anyone chose to pass. It even forgets the 3 cards it passed away itself once the exchange is done, so it never remembers handing you the Q♠.
What actually happens when someone shoots the moon?
If one seat takes all 26 points in a hand, the other 3 seats each take 26 points instead, and the shooter takes none — there is no option to subtract 26 from your own score instead. Taking only the Q♠, without every heart too, is worth its ordinary 13 points and is not a moon.