Spades (full)

Play now the classical Spades game

Spades is a very popular trick-taking game played by two partnerships.

Spades is a trick-based card game, with spades as the trump suit, played with two teams of two members each. For each hand the teams bid to take a number of tricks, and the scoring penalizes teams that regularly take more tricks than they bid. Additional bidding options exist, including allowing individual players to go Naught (that is, try to avoid taking any tricks).

Spades was devised in the United States in the late 1930s and became popular in the 1940s.It is unclear which game it is most directly descended from, but it is known that Spades is a member of the Whist family and is a simplification of Contract Bridge such that a skilled Spades player can learn Bridge relatively quickly (the major additional rules being dynamic trump, the auction, dummy play, and rubber scoring).

The game's rise to popularity in the U.S. came during World War II, when it was introduced by soldiers from its birthplace in Cincinnati, Ohio to various military stations around the world. The game's popularity in the armed forces stems from its simplicity compared to Bridge and Euchre and the fact that it can be more easily interrupted than Poker, all of which were also popular military card games. After the war, veterans brought the game back home to the U.S., where due to the GI Bill it spread to and became popular among college students as well as in home games. It also remained widely popular in countries in which U.S. troops were stationed, both in WWII and later deployments.