Hearts is Non-Casino Trick-Taking Card Game with an Ingenious Twist

droidgamers.com:

With the exception of golf, sports generally encourage you to score as many points as possible—which is why you’re free to call out anybody who refers to something substandard as “below par”. 

Below par means good. 

Likewise, in the world of card games you can sometimes find yourself striving to keep your score low by losing tricks instead of taking them. 

This is called an evasion-type trick-taking game, and it’s a fun twist on the tired old mechanic of chasing points. 

The most popular example of an evasion-type card game is undoubtedly Hearts, thanks no doubt to the fact that Microsoft used to give it away for free with every version of Windows from 3.1 to 7. 

This is how to play hearts.

Deriving from a centuries-old European card game called Reversis, Hearts sees four players competing to avoid taking tricks with Hearts in them. Each Heart is worth a single point, with the Queen of Spades is worth a devastating 13 points. 

Or, if you’re feeling extraordinarily lucky, you can try to Shoot the Moon. 

This involves collecting every single Heart and the Queen of Spades, and if you can pull it off you’ll score zero points for that round while your opponents all score 26. 

As soon as any player accumulates 100 points, the game is over, and the person with the lowest score at that wins. 

Intrigued? You should be. Hearts turns traditional scoring on its head, forcing you to come up with a whole new set of tactics and approaches. It’s also a lot of fun.

And the best way to play Hearts is, unsurprisingly, on heartsgame.com. 

Not only is this website entirely devoted to the Hearts, to the exclusion of everything else, but it contains every feature you could possibly ask for, including custom decks, a variety of difficulty