PSRCardsHeartsVariations

Strange Alternate Rules for Hearts

Ah, yes, here they are. The studiously recompiled "alternate rules for hearts" that were spun out from many an unemployed evening between college and full-time jobs. Enjoy.

These rules are all variations from a standard set of rules for hearts, which may be found here, with each heart worth one point, the queen of spades worth 13, and "Shooting the Moon" allowed.

Information Variations:

• At any point you may see the hand of the person to your left.
• At the start of a hand, you must choose half of your cards and lay them face up in front of you. Play continues as normal.
• At the start of a hand, you place five cards face up in front of you. If you play from this pile of five cards, you must replenish it from the cards in your hand.
• If you win two consecutive hands, you earn the right to look at another player's hand and, if you choose, switch hands with that player.

Leading Variations:

• Deal in one extra player as a stack of face-down cards -- this player is a "war hand." For every trick, deal a card face up from the war hand. The war hand behaves as a normal player in the game, except that it needn't follow suit. What points it takes get added to the kitty, which goes to the last trick. If the war hand takes the last trick, the kitty disappears.

  • A sub-variation: Deal the war hand face up.
• Taking a trick means you get to dictate who leads the next trick, and which suit they lead.
• Leading a four means you can do the above, leading an eight means the card is actually a card below two of the suit you choose.
• After the deal, remove one card from the kitty and place it face down in the center of the table. The first trick goes as usual. For the subsequent tricks, you always lead with the face down card, and then replace it with a card from your hand. (Thus there is always a face down card in the middle of the table.) After the last trick, the face down card goes into the kitty, which goes to the last trick.
• You may lead an arbitrary number of cards in the suit you lead. If you lead x cards, each subsequent player must play x cards. If the players afterwards run out of the suit, they may slough cards of other suits until they have played x cards each.

Scoring Variations:

• Set the diamonds to one point each, with the queen of clubs worth 13 points, and none of the hearts or spades worth anything (tired players hate this).
• Set the Jack of Diamonds to negative ten points.
• All of your points go to the player on your left.

Passing Variations:

• Everyone passes their whole hand to the right after each trick.
• Everyone passes all but one (or two or three) cards to the right after each trick.
• Taking a trick means you may exchange three of your cards with three randomly chosen cards from another player.
• Taking a trick means you may exchange your whole hand with another player's.

Miscellaneous Variations:

• After the middle trick, all hands get reshuffled and redealt to everyone.
• After the middle trick, the ranks reverse; aces become low, deuces become high.

• Split into teams of 2. The number of points you get by the end of the round equals the number of points you have plus the number of points your teammate has. If you shoot the moon, either your team goes down by 26 or everyone but your team goes up by 26.

  • A sub-variation: Every time you take a trick you give one card from the taken trick to your teammate. Your teammate then discards one card into the pile of cards your team has taken.
• Deal out all of the cards face down. Before each trick, you draw two cards from your face-down stack (or as many as are left in your stack) and act as if that is your entire hand. If no one takes the first trick (low club) then that trick goes into a kitty, and players throw low clubs on the next trick, and so on until someone finally takes something. The kitty, if there is one, goes to last trick.

• After the lead card is played, these rules are followed: (In this variation, if a player runs out of cards, the remaining players play out the trick and dump their cards into the kitty, which goes to the last trick.)

  • Even card -- play continues in the current direction
  • Face card -- play continues in the reverse direction
  • Odd card -- play stops, and the high card takes the trick.
• After you win a trick, put the cards of the trick face-down and shuffle them. Then, the player to your left picks one card out of the trick at random and places it in the kitty. Taken tricks stay face-down for the remainder of the game. Kitty goes to last trick.

Footnotes