How to Play Spades: Rules, Setup, and Scoring

Learning how to play spades starts with four players splitting into two fixed partnerships, each player getting thirteen of the fifty-two cards, and every hand opening with a full round of bidding before anyone plays a card. Spades are trump for the whole hand, every player commits to a number of tricks in advance, and your partnership’s score depends on how closely the two of you land on your combined bid - overshoot it and you’re paying a penalty for the extra tricks, not collecting a bonus. This page covers the standard four-player partnership game played to 500 points, the version most home and casual tables mean by spades, and calls out the common house and tournament variations as they come up.

Spades rules: how to play spades in a nutshell

This hub describes standard four-player partnership spades: a fixed 500-point target, ten-point bags, and a 100-point nil bonus or penalty, which is how most home games and apps set up a table when you look up spades rules. Where a specific club, tournament body, or long-standing house habit changes one of those numbers or conventions, that’s flagged in context below rather than presented as the only way to play.

Setup and the deal

Four players sit around the table in two fixed partnerships, with each player’s partner seated directly across from them rather than beside them. Shuffle a standard 52-card deck with no jokers, and deal it out one card at a time, clockwise, starting with the player to the dealer’s left, until all fifty-two cards are gone and everyone holds thirteen. The deal itself rotates clockwise around the table hand after hand, so every player takes a turn as dealer.

The diagram below shows the seating: North and South form one partnership, East and West form the other, and both the deal and the play of each trick move clockwise around the table starting from the dealer’s left.

Bidding

Once everyone has looked at their thirteen cards, bidding goes once around the table, clockwise, starting with the player to the dealer’s left. Every player must name a number of tricks from zero up to thirteen that they expect to win on their own - there’s no suit named in the bid, since spades are trump throughout, and no player may pass. A bid of zero is called nil, a declaration that you expect to take no tricks at all; it isn’t a cop-out, it’s a separate bet with its own bonus and penalty, covered under scoring below.

Add the two partners’ bids together to get the partnership’s combined target for the hand, except that a nil bid itself contributes zero to that combined number - your partner’s bid alone sets the trick target your side needs to hit, while your nil bid rides alongside it as its own win-or-lose proposition.

How a trick works

The player to the dealer’s left leads the first trick with any card except a spade (spades can’t be led at all until they’ve been broken - see below). Going clockwise, each other player must follow suit if they’re able to; if you have none of the suit led, you may play any card in your hand, including a spade. Whoever played the highest card of the suit that was led wins the trick, unless someone played a spade, in which case the highest spade played wins instead, since spades beat every other suit regardless of what was led.

The first time a player plays a spade - almost always because they’re out of the suit that was led and choose to trump in rather than discard - is called “breaking spades.” From that point on in the hand, any player on lead may open a trick with a spade. Whoever wins a trick leads the next one, and this continues until the thirteen cards are played out and the hand is over.

Scoring a hand

Each partnership’s score for the hand starts from its combined bid: 10 points for every trick in that bid if the partnership takes at least that many tricks, plus 1 extra point for every trick won beyond the bid - those extra tricks are called bags. Fall short of the bid, even by one trick, and the partnership loses 10 points for every trick in the bid instead of gaining anything; there’s no partial credit. A nil bid is scored separately from the rest of the partnership’s trick count: if the nil bidder takes zero tricks as promised, their side adds a flat 100 points; if the nil bidder wins even one trick, their side instead subtracts 100 points, and the tricks the nil bidder accidentally won still count toward (or against) the partnership’s regular bid.

Bags are also tracked cumulatively across the whole game, not just within one hand. The moment a partnership’s running bag total reaches ten, 100 points are subtracted from that side’s score right away, and the counter rolls back to whatever bags were left over past the tenth, continuing to accumulate toward the next penalty rather than resetting to zero.

Here’s a worked example across three dealt hands for one partnership, North-South, playing against East-West, showing a nil that succeeds, a nil that fails, and a bag count that crosses the ten-bag penalty.

Hand 1. North bids 3 and South bids nil, so North-South’s trick target is 3. East bids 4 and West bids 2, for an East-West target of 6. North takes 5 tricks, South takes 0 (the nil holds), East takes 3, and West takes 5 - thirteen tricks in total. North-South made their bid with 2 tricks to spare: 30 points for the bid, 2 bag points for the overtricks, and 100 for the successful nil, for 132 points on the hand. East-West also made their bid with 2 tricks to spare: 60 points plus 2 bag points, for 62 points. Running bags: North-South 2, East-West 2.

Hand 2. North bids 5 and South bids nil again, for a North-South target of 5. East bids 3 and West bids 3, for an East-West target of 6. This time South is unlucky and takes 2 tricks, breaking the nil; North takes 6, East takes 2, and West takes 3. North-South’s combined 8 tricks still clears their bid of 5 (50 points plus 3 bag points), but the failed nil costs 100, netting -47 for the hand. East-West’s combined 5 tricks falls short of their bid of 6, so they lose 60 points outright with no bags added. Running bags: North-South 5, East-West still 2.

Hand 3. North bids 2 and South bids 3 (no nil this time), for a North-South target of 5. East bids 1 and West bids 1, for an East-West target of 2. North takes 6 tricks and South takes 5, for 11 - six tricks over the bid. Adding those 6 bags to North-South’s running total of 5 pushes it to 11, crossing the ten-bag threshold: they score 50 for the bid and 6 for the overtricks, then immediately lose 100 for the bag penalty, netting -44, with 1 bag carried over toward the next penalty cycle. East-West takes exactly the 2 tricks they bid, for a clean 20 points and no bags.

Add it up over the three hands and North-South stand at 132 - 47 - 44 = 41, while East-West stand at 62 - 60 + 20 = 22 - a reminder that a nil bid and a big bag total can swing a score hard in either direction long before anyone gets close to 500.

How the game ends

A hand ends the moment all thirteen tricks have been played; score it as above, then the deal passes to the next player clockwise and a fresh hand begins. The game itself ends as soon as either partnership’s cumulative score reaches the agreed target, almost always 500 - whichever side crosses that line first wins, even if the other side’s bid is still being scored for the same hand. If both sides cross the target on the same hand, the higher total wins; a tie at or above the target is unusual enough that most tables just play another hand to break it.

Common variations and house rules

The core rules above describe the common four-player partnership game, but plenty of details vary by table, club, or app:

• Blind nil. Some groups allow a player to bid nil before looking at their cards at all, usually in exchange for a bigger reward: a successful blind nil is worth 200 points instead of 100, and a failed one costs 200. Many versions also let the blind nil bidder swap two cards with their partner, face down, right after bidding closes.
• Three-player spades. Without a fourth player, deal seventeen cards to each of the three players from the full fifty-two-card pack and toss the one leftover card out of play for that game. Everyone plays for themselves rather than in a partnership; bidding and trick-taking otherwise follow the same pattern. A variant instead adds the two jokers as the top two trumps and deals eighteen cards each, using the whole fifty-four-card pack.
• Target score. 500 is standard, but shorter home games sometimes play to 200, and some tournament formats play a fixed number of hands instead of racing to a score at all.
• Bag penalty size. Ten bags for a 100-point deduction is the most common setup, but a few house rules use a smaller bag threshold or a steeper penalty to discourage habitually overbidding low just to rack up easy extra points.
• Spades-broken conventions. The rule that spades can’t be led until they’re broken is near-universal, but a few casual house games relax it once a player has nothing but spades left in hand, letting them lead a spade even if none has been played yet that hand.

If you like the bidding-and-bookkeeping rhythm of spades, dominoes rewards the same kind of close tracking of what’s already been played, just without cards at all. And if you want another game where a wrong guess on your own hand can swing the score hard, the bonus-and-penalty tile scoring in mahjong has a similar bite.