Spades is a partnership game where you say how many tricks you're going to win before you win any of them. You're teamed with the player across from you. The two players on either side are the other team. Spades are always trump.
The bidding is the whole game. Taking more tricks than you promised is almost as bad as taking fewer, so you spend the hand trying to hit a number you picked before you knew what anybody else was holding.
You get 13 cards and you say how many tricks you think you can take. Your bid and your partner's bid get added together. If you say four and your partner says three, your team needs seven.
You score 10 points per trick you bid and made. Miss it and you lose 10 per trick you promised. So bidding six and taking five is worse than bidding five and taking five, by a lot.
Every trick you take past your bid is called a bag and it's worth one point. That sounds fine until you collect ten of them, at which point you lose 100.
This rule exists to stop the obvious cheat, which would be bidding two and taking six every hand. In practice it means that once you've made your bid, you should actually be trying to lose tricks. Throw your low cards away and let the other team have the ones nobody wants.
If you bid nil you're saying you'll take zero tricks. Pull it off and your team gets 100 points. Take even one and you lose 100.
If your partner bids nil, your job changes completely. You lead your highest cards to strip out the suits they might get trapped in, you take tricks aggressively so they can't get stuck with one, and you bid low for yourself because you're covering them now.
You can't lead spades until somebody has been forced to play one on another suit. That's called breaking spades, and it's the rule people forget most often.
There are 13 spades. Once you've counted enough of them going by, your long side suit cards start winning tricks, which is where a lot of bids get made.
Play against three bots or start a table and send the link to three friends. The full guide to Spades covers bidding, nil, bags and what partners do for each other.
Spades was invented in the United States in the 1930s and spread through the army during the Second World War. It's still one of the most played partnership card games in the country, and it's the reason bags exist as a scoring idea at all.
This version is written from scratch to run in a browser. There's no download and no account, it works on a phone as well as a desktop, and empty seats are filled by bots so a game starts the moment you want one. The full rules, scoring and strategy are on the Spades rules page.
Can I lead spades whenever I want?
Not until spades are broken, meaning someone has played one because they couldn't follow suit.
What are bags?
Tricks you take beyond your bid. Each is worth one point, but every ten of them costs you a hundred.
What happens if I bid nil and take a trick?
Your team loses 100 points. Making it is worth 100.
Do bags carry over between hands?
Yes. They add up across the whole game, which is the point of them.
If something here is broken, or a rule doesn't match the way you play, email hello@turngames.io. Saying which game and what you were doing helps. Requests for new games are welcome too.