Players must follow the suit led if able to (with any card of their choice in that suit) - otherwise they may play any card, except that a point card cannot be played to the first trick in each hand. A player with only Hearts left in their hand may lead with a Heart.A player who did not lead a trick may play a Heart to it if they cannot follow suit (and it is not the first trick in the hand).Hearts are broken with the first Heart played in the hand, which can be done in only two situations: For tricks after the first, any card can be led, except that a Heart cannot be led until Hearts have been 'broken'. Subsequent leads are by the winner of the last trick. Any Hearts taken incur 1 point each, and the Queen of Spades incurs 13 points.įor each hand, the player with the Two of Clubs leads first, and they must play that card. The aim is to avoid gaining points, which are incurred by winning a trick including point cards, which are any Hearts and the Queen of Spades. Each player plays one card to a trick, which is won by the player of the highest card of the suit led. In any case, after passing three cards, the players receive three cards, and play begins.Īs Hearts is a trick-taking game, the game progresses by tricks.

On the fifth hand, the cycle starts again, passing to the left. For the first hand, cards are passed to the left for the second, to the right for the third, across and for the fourth, the passing stage is skipped entirely, and the players keep (or 'eat') their cards. The user is given thirteen pseudo-random playing cards, and selects any three of them to pass. The winner is the one who has the fewest points.

The game ends when at least one player has 100 or more points at the end of a hand. The computer uses all three hands against the player. When the game is first loaded, the user is prompted for their name, and then the game begins. Gameplay follows the rules of a version of the Black Lady variant of Hearts. This version of the game no longer prompts for a player name to be entered at startup, and instead uses the name of the currently logged-in user account as the player name. The names are not used in the Windows Vista version of the game, instead favoring the three cardinal directions that the computer players pertain to depending on their side of the window ('West', 'North', and 'East'). One is the spouse of a Microsoft employee who found a program bug, one was a Microsoft employee who resigned in 1995, and one is an employee's child who frequented the Microsoft worksite. In later versions, the three default opponent names, Pauline, Michele, and Ben, were specified by the program's developer. On The Microsoft Hearts Network for Windows for Workgroups 3.1, the default opponent names are Anna, Lynda, and Terri. As part of the operating system, it is deleted upon upgrading to Windows 10 from an earlier version. Hearts is not included with Windows 8, 10 or 11. Later versions of Windows starting with Vista removed this quote. From the 'Help' menu, Hearts offered a quote from Shakespeare's famous play, Julius Caesar (act III, scene ii): 'I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts.'. Hearts continued to be included in subsequent versions of Windows, but was absent in all Windows NT-based OSes prior to Windows XP including Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. This legacy could be seen in the original title bar name for the program, 'The Microsoft Hearts Network' (although network play was removed in the Windows XP version). Microsoft used Hearts to showcase the new NetDDE technology by enabling multiple players to play simultaneously across a computer network. Hearts was first included in Windows with Windows for Workgroups 3.1, Microsoft's first 'network-ready' version of Windows, released in 1992, which included a new networking technology that Microsoft called NetDDE.

An online version, named Internet Hearts was included in Me and XP. Despite the name, the game rules correspond to those of Black Lady in which the queen of spades is a penalty card, in addition to the cards of the heart suit that are the only penalty cards in the traditional card game of Hearts. It was first introduced in Windows 3.1 in 1992, and was included in every version of Windows up to Windows 7. Hearts, also known as Microsoft Hearts, and The Microsoft Hearts Network prior to Windows XP, is a computer game included with Microsoft Windows, based on a card game with the same name. Play will commence with the player who holds the 2 of Clubs leading it. The South player must select three cards, passing them to West and receiving three from East. Hearts in Windows 7 before a hand is played.

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