History of the Card Game Hearts

Hearts has no inventor and no rule-making body. What we know of its history comes from the rule books that printed it, and those are the sources for this page: the US Playing Card Company’s Card Games (1898) and Official Rules of Card Games (1943, and the 1972, 1989 and 1995 editions), Foster’s Complete Hoyle (1914) and the 1926 Hoyle’s Games. Each claim below says where it comes from. Where a date comes only from a later writer, the page says so.

A family of trick-avoiding games

Most trick-taking games reward winning tricks. A few reward losing them, and hearts belongs to that family. Foster’s 1914 Complete Hoyle says some people thought hearts was a new game, but that its principle of losing tricks instead of winning them is found in older games, and names Slobberhannes, Enfle, Schwellen, Polignac and The Four Jacks as relatives. World of Card Games traces the family back to Reversis, which it dates to around 1750.

When hearts itself began is less certain. Pagat says it first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century; World of Card Games puts it between 1850 and 1880.

The 1890s: only the hearts count

The US Playing Card Company’s Card Games of 1898 gives hearts as a game for four people “as individuals”, in which the object is to take as few hearts as possible. It’s quite different from today’s game:

• Only the hearts count. There’s no queen of spades penalty.
• No cards are passed. The player to the dealer’s left leads any card.
• Each deal is settled at once, in counters paid into a pool, rather than in a running score to 100.

The book adds that the game “is not so simple as may appear at first glance”, and that close attention to the cards played lets considerable skill develop.

1914: the pass and the Black Lady

Foster’s Complete Hoyle (1914) still treats hearts as a game in which every deal is settled in counters, with several ways to settle (Sweepstake Hearts and Howell’s Settling among them). It also describes Discard Hearts, in which each player passes three cards to the player on their left before the play, and it notes that this is sometimes called Black Jack or Black Lady, after a black card that counts extra: the jack of spades at 10, or the queen of spades at 13.

Foster’s book also gives Spot Hearts (hearts counted at face value), Joker Hearts, Domino Hearts, Auction Hearts, and games for two, three, five and six players. Several are described on our variations page.

1943: New York Hearts and the first moon

The US Playing Card Company’s Official Rules of Card Games of 1943 still lists Black Lady as a variant of a hearts-only game. But on a later page it describes New York Hearts, which looks much more like today’s game: three cards passed to the left, the queen of spades at 13, the jack of diamonds as a credit of 10, a game often played to 100, and a credit of 26 points for a player who takes all the hearts and the queen. That’s the earliest form of shooting the moon in the rule books we have read.

Some histories date the moon to a British variant of 1939; we haven’t been able to read that book.

1970s to 1990s: “Hearts (Black Lady)”

By the 1972 edition, the US Playing Card Company’s rule book calls its main game Hearts (Black Lady), and the 1989 and 1995 editions keep the same text: three cards passed to the right, the player to the dealer’s left leading any card, the queen of spades discarded at the first opportunity, no rule against leading hearts, and each deal settled between the players. The book has a take-all only in its Omnibus version, with the ten of diamonds as a bonus card.

The modern American game

Today’s game differs from the rule book’s in four main ways, and Pagat records each change:

• The two of clubs leads. Pagat calls the dealer’s-left lead the original rule, still played by some.
• Hearts must be broken before they can be led. Pagat says that in the USA nearly everyone now plays this way, though hearts could originally be led at any time.
• The pass rotates left, right, across and then not at all.
• The moon is a standard rule, scored by adding 26 to the others or taking 26 off the shooter.

It’s the game most people learned on a computer. CardGames.io describes hearts as a popular game included with many versions of Windows, and Microsoft’s help pages for the Windows Vista and Windows 7 versions describe exactly these rules, with every moon adding 26 to the other players. (Later writers disagree about which early-1990s version of Windows first included it; we haven’t found a Microsoft source that says.) Online games followed with the same rules, and with the house-rule arguments that come with them.

Hearts around the world

Pagat describes several relatives and regional versions:

• Black Maria, the British version, usually for three players, with the king and ace of spades counting in one of its scorings (variations).
• Rickety Kate, the Australian version, which Pagat calls practically identical to the American game.
• Dame de Pique, a French Canadian version with no passing, in which the player to the dealer’s left leads.
• Gong Zhu (Catch the Pig), an enhanced version played in China, which Richard Garfield’s Turbo Hearts is based on.
• Hartenjagen, the Dutch version, played with 32 cards.

The names

“Black Lady” and “Black Maria” are old names for the queen of spades itself, used in the US Playing Card Company’s rule book and the Hoyle software rules; Black Maria is also the name of the British game. “Shooting the moon” has other names too: a slam (Pagat and the rule books), a run (the Cavendish club’s rules) or a take-all. This site is named after it.