Spades: Classic Card Game

Spades the way it is played at a kitchen table: four players, two partnerships, spades always trump. Bid your tricks, make your contract, keep an eye on your bags — and when the hand is right, go nil.

SEVEN WAYS TO PLAY

Partners — the classic: everyone bids once, your bid and your partner's make the team's contract. Solo — no partners, your own bid, bags and score. Mirror — everyone bids exactly the spades they hold. Whiz — bid your spades, or nil. Forced Nil — in each team one player goes nil, the other bids four or more. Jokers — two jokers and the deuces of diamonds and spades become the top trumps. Oh Hell — on your own, thirteen cards down to one: bid exactly the tricks you take.

NIL, BLIND NIL AND BAGS

Bid nil for 100 points and try to take nothing while your partner covers you. When your team is 100 behind, you may bid blind nil before you look at your cards, for 200. Every trick over the contract is a bag, and ten bags cost 100 — the scoring serious players expect.

A SCORE PAD, NOT A CASINO

The game is drawn as a paper score pad: bids are written on the players' tags, bags are pencil strokes, a broken nil is struck through, and the score sheet fills itself in after each hand. At the end of a game the winner's total is ringed in pencil. No coins, no chips, no timers, nothing flashing at you. A dark mode prints the pad in reverse.

OPPONENTS THAT PLAY THE GAME

Three levels. The hard one samples up to two hundred possible deals before every card and bids by expected points; it covers its partner's nil and tries to break yours. Easy is forgiving. Normal is a fair table.

PLAY IT YOUR WAY

Games to 250, 300 or 500. Three game speeds. Small, normal or large cards. A four-color deck if you tell suits apart by color. An optional bid hint while you learn. The last trick one tap away, a how-to-play page, and your record of games, wins and nils held.

MADE WITH CARE

Hand-drawn court cards, a deal that comes from the dealer's hand and sorts itself as you pick it up, jazz in the background with separate sound and music levels.

HONEST MONEY

Every way to play is free. An ad comes only between hands — never during play, and there are no rewarded videos. One purchase, Spades Premium, removes the ads and adds the engraved deck and two more card backs. Nothing that wins a trick is for sale.

YOUR DATA

Everything stays on the phone: settings and your record. No account, no sign-in. The ad SDK uses the Android advertising ID; the privacy policy says exactly what is used and why.

Plays offline, in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Turkish.

Recent changes:
A small fix: the players' name tags no longer jump up the screen when a hand ends.