Hearts Online

Description

Welcome to King of Hearts. You’ll be playing against 3 artificial computers.

There are many variations of Hearts, here is the basic rule for this one from Wikipedia.

1. The objective of Hearts is to get as few points as possible. Each heart gives one penalty point. There is also
   one special card, the Queen of spades, which gives 13 penalty points.
2. When the game starts you select 3 cards to pass to one of your opponents. Typically you want to pass your three worst
   cards to get rid of them. Which opponent you pass to varies, you start by passing to the opponent on your left, then in the
   next game you pass to the opponent on your right, third game you pass across the table and in the fourth game there is no
   card passing.
3. Each turn starts with one player playing a single card, also called leading. The suit of that card determines the suit
   of the trick. The other players then play one card each. If they have a card in the same suit as the first card then they must
   play that. If they don’t then they can play one of their other cards. Once four cards have been played, the player who played
   the highest ranking card in the original suit takes the trick, i.e. he takes the four cards on the table and he then starts the
   next turn. Any penalty cards in the trick (hearts or queen of spades) are added to the players penalty score. So you want to
   avoid taking any tricks that have hearts or the queen of spades.
4. The player who has the two of clubs at the start of the game leads in the first hand, and he MUST lead with the two of clubs.
5. You cannot lead a trick with hearts, until hearts has been broken (played on another suit). So if it is your turn to lead and no
   heart has been played yet then you may not select a heart as the card to play first. In some variations of the game you can’t
   play the queen of spades until hearts has been broken as well, but in this version you can always play the queen of spades and
   she doesn’t break hearts.
6. In the very first round you may never play a heart or the queen of spades, not even if you don’t have any card in the suit of the lead card.
7. Once all cards have been played the penalty points are counted and the player with the fewest points wins that hand. When one or more players
   reach 100 points or more then the entire game is finished, and the player with the least points win. If points are over 100 and there are
   two or more equal with the least points then play continues until there’s only one winner.
8. Shooting the Moon! Generally it’s bad to get penalty cards, but there is one extra twist! If you get ALL the penalty cards
   (13 hearts + Queen of spades) then you get 0 points and the other 3 players get 26 points each! This is called Shooting the Moon.
   Trying this can be a really risky move though, since if another player gets just one of the hearts you’ll end up with a lot of points…

As always, good luck and Have Fun!