Spades has been a fixture at kitchen tables, cookouts, and break rooms for generations, and the reason is simple: it takes about five minutes to learn and a lifetime to stop arguing about. Four players, an ordinary deck of cards, and one promise to keep — say how many tricks you’ll win, then win exactly that many. Everything else is detail.
Those details are where the fun and the feuds live: the bidding, the nil bids, and the bag penalty that can quietly erase a good lead in a single hand. This page covers the complete rules of Spades from the ground up. You don’t need any card-game background to follow it. By the end you’ll be able to deal a hand, bid, play it out, and keep score. If you’d rather have a slower walkthrough to read with a deck in your hands, how to play Spades takes it one step at a time.
What You Need to Play
Spades is built for four players in two partnerships. You and your partner sit across from each other, so play alternates between your team and the other one as it goes around the table. All you need is a standard 52-card deck. Take the jokers out, because the standard game doesn’t use them, even though a few house versions do.
The cards rank in the usual order, from the ace down to the two:
A (high), K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 (low)
And here’s the one thing that makes Spades what it is: the spade suit is always trump. A spade beats any card in the other three suits, no matter how high. The lowly two of spades will take a trick over the ace of hearts. Hold onto that idea, because it drives the whole game.
Spades also adapts to a two-handed game or a three-player “cutthroat” game with no partners. For the two-player version, see 2-player Spades; the three-player and other setups are covered under house rules and variations.
The Goal of the Game
Every hand, your team predicts how many of the 13 tricks the two of you will win between you. That prediction is your bid. Make it and you score. Fall short and you get penalized. Win too many, and oddly enough that hurts you too — the extra tricks pile up as “bags” and come back to bite you later.
So Spades isn’t about grabbing as many tricks as you can. It’s about winning exactly what you said you would. A team that bids carefully and hits its number will beat a team that scoops up every trick in sight. The first side to reach the target score, usually 500 points, wins the game. (There’s more to say about that target and how long a game runs on the how many points to win page.)
Setting Up and Dealing
Pick a dealer however you like; cutting for high card is the usual way. The dealer shuffles, the player to their right cuts the deck, and then all 52 cards are dealt out one at a time, clockwise, until everyone holds 13. After the hand is over, the deal passes to the left.
Everyone picks up their cards and takes a good look, because the bidding comes next, and that’s where the hand really starts.
Bidding
Beginning with the player to the dealer’s left and moving clockwise, each player says out loud how many tricks they expect to win. You’re looking at your hand and counting your likely winners: high spades, aces, a king or two with cards to protect them.
A couple of things tend to surprise newcomers. There’s no passing here, so everyone has to name a number. And unlike a game such as bridge, your bid doesn’t have to beat the last person’s. Four players might bid 3, 4, 2, and 4 in any order at all. The two partners’ bids are simply added together to set the team’s contract. If you bid 4 and your partner bids 3, your side needs 7 tricks that hand.
Then there’s the bold one: a bid of zero, called Nil. Bidding Nil is a promise to win no tricks whatsoever that hand. Pull it off and it’s worth a hefty bonus, but take even one trick and it costs you just as much. There’s a riskier cousin, Blind Nil, declared before you’ve even looked at your cards. Both are worth understanding properly before you try them, which is why the details live on the Nil and Blind Nil page. Learning to read a hand and pick a sensible number is a skill in itself, and that one is covered in Spades bidding.
Playing the Hand
The player to the dealer’s left leads the first trick by playing any card except a spade (more on that rule in a second). Going clockwise, each player lays down one card. You have to follow suit: if hearts are led and you hold a heart, you must play one. Only when you’re out of the suit led can you play something else, including a spade. Failing to follow suit when you could have is called reneging, and most groups treat it as a penalty against the offending team.
Once all four cards are on the table, someone wins the trick. The winner is whoever played the highest spade. If no spade was played at all, it’s the highest card of the suit that was led. The king of diamonds doesn’t beat the ace of diamonds, and neither of them beats even a small spade. Whoever takes the trick gathers up those four cards, sets them aside face down, and leads the next one.
That’s the rhythm of a whole hand: lead, follow, win the trick, lead again, thirteen times over, until every hand is empty. If you’d like to see a full hand played out card by card, there’s a worked example on the how to play page.
Breaking Spades
This is the rule that causes more confusion than any other, so it’s worth slowing down for. You cannot lead a spade until spades have been “broken.” Spades get broken the first time someone plays one because they couldn’t follow the suit that was led. Until that moment, nobody is allowed to open a trick with a spade. They can only come out when a player is forced to use one.
There’s a single exception. If spades are literally all you have left in your hand, you’ve no other choice, and then you’re allowed to lead one.
It sounds like a small thing, but it shapes the timing of the entire hand, and it trips up beginners and old hands alike. The full explanation, with examples, is on the breaking Spades page.
Keeping Score
Scoring rewards accuracy more than greed. If your team takes at least as many tricks as it bid, you score 10 points for each trick you bid. Bid 7 and make it, and that’s 70 points. Any tricks beyond your bid are bags, and each one is worth a single extra point.
Those bags look harmless, and for a while they are. But they carry over from hand to hand, and the moment your team collects ten of them, you lose 100 points in one swing. That penalty, often called sandbagging, is exactly why good players refuse to take tricks they don’t need. It’s worth reading up on, and the bags and sandbagging page goes into the details.
Miss your bid and the hand flips against you. Instead of scoring, you lose 10 points for every trick you bid, so a team that bids 5 and takes only 4 drops 50 points. A successful Nil adds 100 points to your team; a failed one subtracts 100. Blind Nil doubles both the reward and the risk.
If that’s a lot to take in, don’t worry about it. Scoring clicks into place fast once you’ve actually kept a hand or two. The full breakdown, with worked examples, is on the Spades scoring page.
Winning the Game
Play continues hand after hand, the deal rotating around the table, until one team crosses the finish line. Most groups play to 500 points, which usually takes somewhere between eight and twelve hands. Shorter games to 250 or 300 are common when time is tight. If both teams happen to cross the line in the same hand, the higher score takes it. The how many points to win page has more on game length and the different targets people use.
Variations and House Rules
What’s above is the standard partnership game, and it’s what most people mean when they say “Spades.” But nearly every family and friend group plays with a few wrinkles of their own: a different bag penalty, whether Blind Nil is even allowed, how to handle a misdeal, special bids with names like “whiz” or “mirror.” None of those are wrong. The trouble only starts when two people at the table quietly assume different rules. It’s always worth settling the house rules before the first hand rather than after the first dispute. The common ones are gathered on the house rules and variations page.
Where to Go Next
That’s everything you need to sit down and play a full game of Spades. When you’re ready to play well rather than just play, the strategy guide covers bidding judgment, covering a partner’s Nil, and staying clear of bags. If a specific question comes up mid-game, the Spades FAQ handles the ones that come up most often. And if you’d like the essentials on one printable page to keep beside the table, the free Spades cheat sheet has you covered.