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This page is part of the Invented Games section of the Card Games web site. It is a collection of variations of the traditional card game Hearts.

• Joker Hearts
• Reverse Hearts
• Super Hearts
• Two Blind Bitches
• Two-Player Hearts
• Valentine Hearts
• Wilson System

Joker Hearts

Jonathan Crawford writes:

Was reading your hearts page, and thought I would tell you about a variation that my coworkers and I came up with. We played single and double deck, with as much as nine people, but the item I want to tell you about is that we added up to four jokers, which were basically free cards.  They basically count as nothing.  They cannot take a trick, and are great to have when you don't want to play that Q of spades.  You can play them at any time, even if you can follow suit.  You can also lead them and force the next player to lead.  It is an interesting rule that makes it even more difficult to shoot the moon.

Two-Player Hearts

Contributed by Jeffrey Hope who writes:

"I still consider Two-Player Hearts to be a work in progress, but I think I've settled on most of the rules. One of my goals of Two-Player Hearts is to adapt the game to most of the major Hearts variations played, so anything new is either a variation or an adaptation of a major variation not yet covered here.

"Also, this game has very little if anything in common with Darrin Berkley's newly contributed Two-Player Spades. The closest two-player Hearts variant to Two-Player Spades that I can figure out would be Two Blind Bitches."

These rules assume you already know how to play Hearts. If you don't, you can always refer to the rules of standard Hearts.

Before you play, remove all the 3's, 5's, 7's, 9's, Jacks, Kings and Jokers from the deck, leaving 28 cards.

The first card is dealt face down to a widow, then 13 cards are dealt to each player, then the final card is added face down to the same widow.

If you're used to the "pass three cards" rule, you only pass one card. If you go by the "left, right, across, keep" rule (or some variation of that), you alternate passing and not passing. You still cannot look at the card passed to you until you've passed a card.

Convention: If your opponent has passed to you, but you haven't passed yet, you may place your passed card face-up, since both of you know what it is anyway. You still have to pass before you look at the card passed to you, and of course you can't pass the same card back.

Those playing by the "Two of clubs plays first" rule can still follow it. Otherwise, the non-dealer plays first.

If the 2 rule is used and neither player has it, then the 4 starts. This obviously means that the 2 is in the widow. If the 2 and 4 are both in the widow the 6 starts.

The Jack of Diamonds is removed from the deck, so if you like play "Omnibus Hearts", in which the J reduces your score by 10 points, the 10 is used instead and the card now takes away only five points, not 10.

The Queen of Spades adds 7 penalty points instead of 13.

If you normally play that all hearts are worth one point, this scoring is still in effect. If you play Spot Hearts (where the hearts are worth face value), and aces are high for this rule, the value of the hearts is halved. If you play Spot Hearts but aces are low for this rule, scoring gets a bit more complicated: the A and 2 keep their normal values, but the 4 is worth three, the 6 is worth 4, the 8 is worth 5, the 10 is worth 6, and the Q is worth 7! (Two queens to avoid! Oh no!) However, the ace-high version is preferable as the scores are easier to remember. The spade queen may be made 13 points rather than 7 if desired. This is because Spot Hearts players often play with the Q as 25 points. In two-player hearts the scores are halved and rounded, so 25 converts to 13.

Shooting the moon causes the other player to score 14 points (or 35 in Spot Hearts or 41 with the 13-point Q in Spot Hearts) while you score zero for the hand. It doesn't count as shooting the moon if there are point cards in the widow. This is not too bad if the Q is in there, but more likely it will be a heart, causing a disastrous penalty.

There is no bonus for shooting the sun in this game.

If playing one-point-per-heart, the first person to 50 points loses. For two-player Spot Hearts, 250 loses the game. If both players go above 50 or 250 in the same deal, but one has a lower score than the other, that player wins. Example: Both players, in regular 2PH, somehow have 49 points (a break-even average). One person gets eight points that round while the opponent gets five (there was a heart in the widow), resulting in a 57-54 score. The winner would be the one with 54 points. However, if the two players are tied, a tiebreaker hand is played. There is no passing in the tiebreaker. It's up to the players to decide in advance whether shooting the moon is allowed in the tiebreaker deal.

Variations

1. If you are playing with very young children (or very hard-pressed for time and can only squeeze maybe two or three rounds at max), don't keep a running total.
2. There are five passing variations available:
1. From the fact that I can't remember whether the original game mentioned in the history below passed one or two cards: If you don't use a passing pattern, always pass two cards. If a passing pattern is used, then pass two, hold, pass two, hold, etc.
2. If you don't like hold hands: Pass one, pass two, pass one, pass two, etc. (it doesn't matter which you start with but you need to agree in advance which one to use first)
3. If it bothers you that the number of cards passed can be figured out solely by who's dealing: Pass one, pass two, hold, pass one, pass two, hold, etc. (you can switch the pass ones and the pass twos if you like but every third hand must be a hold)
4. Both 2b and 2c apply to you: Pass one, pass two, pass three, pass one, pass two, pass three, etc. (or in descending order if you want: Pass three, pass two, pass one, pass three, pass two, pass one, etc.)
5. You can follow normal Hearts procedure and pass three cards each time (or alternate passing three cards and not passing). In fact, the only reason I didn't put in this variant until now is because I caught myself passing this way on September 2, 2006. It was the very first hand, so we agreed to pass three and hold for that evening (we play with hold hands).
3. The original rules gave Omnibus Hearts players the choice bewteen treating the 10 or the Q as the replacement for the removed J as long as you stay with the card you decided on. I've settled on the former from reading an Omnibus Hearts variation already in use on the regular Hearts page, but you can still play with the Q if you want (it's just no longer an official rule).
4. Some players deduct what in Two Player Hearts is the equivalent of 14, 35, or 41 points when shooting the moon instead of add to the opponent's score. If you play Omnibus Hearts and require the 10 or Q to shoot the moon, add five to these values.

History - Jeffrey Hope writes:

"I created the game in El Paso, Texas, USA. I still live there. The first time that I have personally played outside El Paso was in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA on either July 3 or July 4 (I can't remember the exact date) of 2005 with my cousin. I won the game. (I don't want any vicious competition, but I'll welcome e-mails for people outside of El Paso who have played it saying that they've played earlier. Again, no vicious competition. Put "Two-Player Hearts" as the subject because if it ends up in my spam folder, I'll [hopefully] know it's legitimate.)

"I created the game sometime in the first half of 2004 (I think) because my mom (48 at the time assuming the date is correct) and I (then 14) both play hearts on the computer (her more than me), and at some point I wanted to play her, but there were two problems--the hearts game (the one which comes with Windows nowadays) is a one-player game, and we are the only two in the household who play Hearts. Hence came the first rules of the Two-Player Hearts game.

"The original rules were based on the computer game. If you play the Hearts game which comes with Windows computers, you have some idea of the rules we play by, but if you have a Macintosh (or have it but don't play it), we play by the 2C rule and we pass cards. I don't remember whether we passed one or two cards the first time (which is why I added the passing variation on this page).

"Originally, 14 cards were dealt with no widow (the cards that were removed are the same ones removed today). After a period of time when we never played, I decided to somewhat "re-teach" her my game, with the 14-card rule still in effect. My mom quickly found that it's very easy to get your opponent to do what you want him to do (she's a better Hearts player than I am), so she created the widow rule (the only rule original to Two-Player Hearts I didn't create)."

Reverse Hearts

Contributed by Wendy Harvie

This is a partnership game. You and your partner (the player across from you) score positive points for taking hearts (1 each) and the queen of spades (13), while the jack of diamonds becomes a penalty card (-10). The game is won by the first team to 100 points. So the scoring is the reverse of normal hearts.

To make it more interesting, you can agree that a team that takes all the hearts and the queen of spades loses 26 points - shooting the moon in reverse.

At one time this variation was available to play on line at MSN Game Zone, but has since been removed.

Wilson System

This is a system of settling the final scores in the standard game of Hearts, which has a considerable effect on tactics towards the end of a game, and is particularly interesting when the game played for money. It has the useful feature that the final positive and negative scores always balance, with a sum of zero. Dave Jordan writes that he encountered this variation at MIT in 1966. It was popular for late night nickle a point games.

Points are counted as usual - hearts one point, queen of spades 13 points. If someone shoots the moon it's their option whether to subtract 26 from their own score or add 26 to everyone else's. The game ends when any player(s) have a score of at least 100 points.

Each player's final result is determined by the difference between their own points and the points of the next higher player (if any) and the next lower player (if any). Each player gets paid by the player above and pays the player below. For example:

If scores are tied, the players split the positive and negative.
Example: if the scores are A:103, B:50, C:50, D:10 then B and C spilt the net result of +13 between them: each wins 6.5 while A pays 53 and D collects 40.

This variation introduces considerable late game strategy as players jostle for position. Minor differences in scores often lead to major differences in outcome. One less obvious result occurs when two or three players are about to go out - at, say, 90 points - while the remaining one or two are still very low - say around 20 points. At that point the high score players can maximize their results by ending up with the highest score so they tend to fight over the remaining points. Also, if there are two or three players with low scores they, too, may be in a position to maximize their results by taking more points than their opponents.