Spades — free partnership card game against the computer

Thirteen cards each, four players, two partnerships. You sit with North against West and East. Before a card is played everyone says how many tricks they expect to take; your bid and your partner's are added together, and the two of you must take at least that many.

Spades are permanent trumps: a spade beats any card of any other suit. One hand per round, and your score is the number of contracts you make in a row — miss one and the run is over. Free, no download, no sign-up, and a half-finished hand is saved if you close the tab.

How to play

• Bid first. Tap a number; the suggested bid is outlined, and it is only a suggestion.
• Follow suit if you can. Cards you cannot legally play are dimmed.
• A spade wins any trick it is played on, and the highest spade wins if there is more than one.
• Spades cannot be led until someone has played one on another suit — until they are "broken".
• Make your combined bid to keep the streak. Overtricks are fine here and are shown as bags, but only the contract matters.

Bidding is a promise, and the hand that beats you is the one you cannot control

Everything in Spades follows from one thing: your bid is a promise, and the promise is joint. If you bid four and your partner bids three, the two of you owe seven tricks. Take six and you have failed, no matter which of you fell short.

So the first skill is counting a hand honestly, and the honest count is smaller than it looks. Aces are tricks. A king with at least one small card behind it is usually a trick — the small card is what lets you play low when the ace appears, so the king survives to win later; that is what "guarded" means, and an unguarded king is a coin flip. Beyond that, long spades are tricks in a vague way: if you hold five spades and someone else holds two, three of yours will win something eventually, but you cannot say when.

The computer here bids on exactly that count and so does the suggestion under your hand: aces, guarded kings, and spade length above three. It is deliberately conservative, because in Spades the cost of missing a contract is total and the cost of an overtrick is nothing much.

The second skill is the one that separates people who know the rules from people who can play, and it is about which trick you take. If your partner is already winning the trick, taking it from them wins your side nothing — you have spent a card to move a trick from one pocket to another. Play your lowest card instead and keep the winner for a trick nobody is winning yet. The computer follows the same rule, which is why it will sometimes throw a two under your ace rather than a king.

And the third is patience with trumps. A spade played on a trick you were going to win anyway is a wasted trump; a spade played on the trick where the opponents hold every high card is worth two of them. Hold the small spades. They are worth more later than the big ones are now.

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• Cribbage — Throw two to your crib, peg to thirty-one, then count the show. One deal at a time.
• Speed — No turns at all. Both of you play at once, one rank up or down, until someone runs out.
• Solitaire — Classic Klondike, built for one hand: tap a card and it moves itself. Undo, auto-finish, and your best time saved.

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