Game 86: Hearts

 Once again it's time to share a game that can be played with one of the hundreds of standard 52-card decks from our shelves.  This time it's Hearts.  Again, a game we hadn't played in years but one I remember playing a lot in the past; I seem to recall it being on that we played often with David's siblings.  Anyway  .  .  .  we were visiting our oldest son and his family in Long Beach this weekend, so we were, of course, gaming.  Hearts was David's choice.  We had already played Sushi Go and No Thanks, and Jacob was really jonesin' to play Deception, but David got his way on this one  .  .  .
 In Hearts you deal out all the cards, and whatever cards are left become a kitty that is taken by the first player to take a trick containing points.  Each heart is worth 1 point, and the queen of spades is worth 13 points.  The goal is to get the fewest points.  There is the option to "shoot the moon," in which case you earn 0 points and all the other players get 26 points.  Shooting the moon is very hard to do, though, because other players catch on pretty quickly if someone is trying to take points rather than avoid points, and they then hold on to high cards to try to take a point or two towards the end so that the other player can't shoot the moon.  We play by a grace rule as well, which is that if you hit 100 points exactly you go back to 0.
 I'm reasonably happy with the hand above.  I'm short-suited, and though I do have the queen of spades I have lots of other spades as well, so I'm not going to end up being forced to play it when someone leads spades and then end up taking it.
There is no bidding, and there is no trump.  The person who goes first is the person with the 2 of clubs in hand.  No one is allowed to play points on the first hand (whew - a safe one!), and no one can lead in hearts until hearts are "broken" - that is, until someone had played hearts off-suit in another hand.  (This rarely happens, but if no one has the 2 of clubs - meaning it's in the kitty - then the person with the 3 of clubs plays first.)

I used to be more of a card game player - very into it!  But I've been drawn in so much by the awesome board games that have come out in the past couple of decades such as Settlers of Catan, Seven Wonders, Stone Age, Dominion, Splendor, Carcassonne, Pandemic Legacy, etc.  It was almost hard, though maybe also "healthy"(?), to go back to such a classic game with a standard 52-card deck.  I may try to add in a bit more of this - it keeps David happy too.  I think also that it may soon be time for me to get out the Backgammon board and to revisit that classic.

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