Hearts (card game)

Hearts is an "evasion-type" trick-taking playing card game for four players, although most variations can accommodate between three and six players. It was first recorded in the United States in the 1880s and has many variants, some of which are also referred to as "Hearts", especially the games of Black Lady and Black Maria. The game is a member of the Whist group of trick-taking games (which also includes Bridge and Spades), but is unusual among Whist variants in that it is a trick-avoidance game; players avoid winning certain penalty cards in tricks, usually by avoiding winning tricks altogether. The original game of Hearts is still current, but it has been overtaken in popularity by Black Lady in the United States and Black Maria in Great Britain, respectively.

The game of Hearts probably originated with Reversis, which became popular around 1750 in Spain. In this game, a penalty point was awarded for each trick won, plus additional points for taking J♥ or Q♥ in tricks. A similar game called "Four Jacks" centred around avoiding any trick containing a Jack, which were worth one penalty point, and J♠ worth two.

Hearts itself emerged in the United States during the 1880s, The Standard Hoyle of 1887 reporting that it had only been played there for "the last five years" and was "probably of German origin". It described Hearts as "a most pleasant game, highly provocative of laughter". It was a no-trump, trick-taking game for four players using a full pack of cards, the aim being to avoid taking any hearts in tricks. The basic format has changed little since. Two scoring variants were mentioned under the name 'Double or Eagle Game'. The first was the precursor to Spot Hearts whereby the cards of the heart suit cost the following in chips: Ace 14, King 13, Queen 12, Jack 11 and pip cards their face value. The second scoring scheme was: Ace 5, King 4, Queen 3, Jack 2 and all pips 1 chip each.

In 1909, the Q♠ was added as the highest penalty card in a variant called either Discard Hearts, after the new feature of passing unwanted cards to other players following the deal, or Black Lady, after the nickname for the Q♠. This new variant has since become the standard game of the Hearts group in the United States where it is often, somewhat confusingly, also called "Hearts". To begin with, Black Lady did not have the option of "shooting the moon"; that came later.

In the 1920s, the J♦ variation (ten positive points) was introduced. Sometime later, the scoring was reversed so that penalty points were expressed as positive instead of negative.

The slam is known as "shooting the moon" and first appeared in Britain in 1939 in a variant of Hearts called Hitting the Moon. Today this feature is a common element of modern Black Lady.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the game of Black Maria, with its additional penalty cards in the suit of spades, emerged in 1939. Both it and another offshoot, Omnibus Hearts, are "sufficiently different and popular to justify descriptions as separate games."

The game has increased in popularity through Internet gaming sites which, however, usually offer the Black Lady variant while still calling it Hearts, whereas most books maintain the distinction between the two games. Microsoft Windows included Hearts (in fact Black Lady) in its operating system from Windows 3.1 to Windows 7, making it one of the earliest digital renditions.