Games Like Spades

Whist is where the whole structure comes from. Four players in two partnerships, 52 cards, thirteen tricks, follow suit if able. In the classic English game the trump suit is set by turning up the dealer's last card, there is no bidding at all, and a side scores one point for each trick beyond six, with the game played to five points. A Spades player finds it instantly familiar and strangely quiet: take away the bid and the contract, the nil and the bags go with it, leaving pure card play and partnership reading. It is worth a few hands, because nothing shows you what the Spades bid does quite like playing without one.

Euchre is the American Midwest's other great partnership trick game, and a much quicker one. It uses a stripped 24-card deck of nine through ace, deals five cards each and plays five tricks per hand. Trump is decided each deal by an upcard turned from the stock, which players in turn may accept or pass; if everyone passes, there is a second round in which a player may name a different suit.

The ranking is what catches Spades players out. In the trump suit, the jack of that suit, the right bower, is the highest card, and the jack of the same colour, the left bower, comes second and counts as a trump rather than as a card of its printed suit. A side that names trump and then fails to take three of the five tricks is euchred, and the opponents score two. There is also going alone, where a player sends their partner out of the hand for a bigger score.

Why a Spades player would like Euchre: partnership trick-taking, a decision that works like a bid, and a punishment for overreaching, all squeezed into hands that take two minutes. Why it feels different: five tricks leave almost no room to plan, and thanks to the bowers the trump suit holds seven cards while one of the other suits is down to five.

Callbreak, also called Call Bridge and popular in Nepal, India and Bangladesh, is the closest thing to Spades on this list, and its differences are exactly the ones that matter. Spades are always trump. Thirteen tricks. Follow suit if you can. But everyone plays for themselves, with no partnerships, and there is no nil, because nobody is allowed to call zero.

The play rules are also stricter than in Spades. Run out of the suit led and you must trump, as long as your spade can beat any spade already in the trick, and many tables go further and make you head the trick, playing a card that beats the current best whenever you have one. That obligation removes most of the ducking and hiding Spades card play is built on, and it makes trump management brutally forced.

Scoring is blunter too. Make your call and you score it; miss it and it comes straight off your total. Many groups play a fixed five deals and give overtricks a small fraction of a point each, though the rules vary from place to place. There are no bags, and the highest total wins. If you like Spades bidding but find depending on a partner frustrating, this is the game to try.

Oh Hell, also known as Oh Pshaw, Blackout and a handful of other names, takes the Spades bidding idea and makes it merciless. Every player bids the exact number of tricks they will take, and the reward goes only to those who hit that number precisely: one trick over is as much a miss as one trick under. Players usually play for themselves.

The hand size changes every deal, and that is what makes it work. Some groups start at one card each and climb; others start with big hands, shrink to a single card and climb back again, usually with a new trump turned up each deal. A one-card hand is almost pure guesswork; a ten-card hand is a real planning problem. Many groups also bar the dealer from bidding the number that would make the bids add up to the number of tricks, which guarantees that somebody fails.

For a Spades player this is the purest form of a skill you already have. Spades punishes overtricks slowly, through bags; Oh Hell punishes them at once. It also teaches you to lose tricks on purpose, which is a genuinely different craft from winning them.

Tarneeb is the big partnership trick game of the Levant, and its name simply means trump. The most widespread form has four players in two partnerships and thirteen tricks, with an auction in which nobody may bid fewer than seven tricks; the highest bidder names the trump suit, and their side must take at least the bid. Regional and family versions differ a good deal, including a well-known one scored to 41, so agree the rules before the first deal.

What a Spades player gains is the very thing Spades leaves out: a competitive auction where winning lets you choose the trump suit. Everything else stays familiar, which makes Tarneeb an unusually easy step up.

Bridge is the same idea taken as far as it will go. Auctions with suit and notrump contracts, the declarer's partner laying their hand face up as the dummy, doubling and redoubling, vulnerability, and bidding conventions that turn the auction into a private code. It is by a wide margin the deepest game here and the only one you need to study before you can really take part. If the bid is your favourite part of Spades, Bridge is where that road ends.

Both of these change what you are counting. Instead of how many tricks you took, you count the value of the cards inside them, and that changes what a good card is. A ten becomes a serious prize, and a jack can outrank an ace.

Pinochle uses a doubled deck, 48 cards in the single-deck game, with a popular double-deck version of 80, and adds a melding phase in which you score for combinations held in your hand before play begins. Partnership Pinochle keeps the four-player, two-team shape a Spades player knows, but each hand has two jobs: declare your melds, then win enough card points to protect them.

Belote, called Belot in Bulgaria, where it is close to a national game, uses a 32-card deck of seven through ace, four players in partnerships, and a rank order that changes with trump: in the trump suit the jack is highest and worth 20 points and the nine is second and worth 14, while outside trump the ace leads and jacks are nearly worthless. It also enforces following suit and overtrumping far more strictly than Spades, and it has declarations for card sequences and for holding the king and queen of trump. It is a denser game than Spades and rewards a good memory. Belot plays on this site too, right in the browser, so you can try it without gathering a table.

Hearts is on the list because every Spades player ends up at a Hearts table sooner or later, but it is the odd one out. There is no trump suit, no bidding and no partnership, and tricks are not the goal; they are the hazard. Each heart taken costs a point, the queen of spades costs thirteen, the lowest score wins, and the game ends when someone reaches 100.

The one thing it shares with Spades is the habit of counting a suit and knowing who is void. Everything else is inverted, including the instinct to win with your highest card. Play it when you want the opposite of everything Spades has taught you, or when your group is not exactly four and nobody wants to sit out.

Want a partner and something new tonight? Play Euchre. Want Spades without depending on a partner? Play Callbreak. If bidding is the part you love and you want it sharper, play Oh Hell; if you want it deeper and are ready to study, play Bridge, with Tarneeb as the gentler step in between.

If you want a genuinely different way of keeping score and do not mind learning a new rank order, play Belote or Pinochle: they take a few sessions to click, and then they are hard to put down. And if you would like to stop winning tricks altogether for an evening, play Hearts.