Games Like Spades

Whist is where the whole structure comes from. Four players in two partnerships, 52 cards, thirteen tricks, follow suit if able. In the classic English game the trump suit is decided by turning up the dealer's last card, there is no bidding at all, and a side scores one point for each trick beyond six, with the game played to five points. A Spades player finds it immediately familiar and strangely quiet: removing the bid removes the contract, the nil and the bags, leaving pure card play and partnership reading. It is worth a few hands because it makes the function of the Spades bid obvious by its absence.

Euchre is the American Midwest's other great partnership trick game and a much quicker one. It uses a stripped 24-card deck of nine through ace, deals five cards each, and plays five tricks per hand. Trump is decided each deal by an upcard turned from the stock, which players in turn may accept or pass, and if everyone passes there is a second round where a player may name a different suit.

The rank change is what catches Spades players out. In the trump suit the jack of that suit, the right bower, is the highest card, and the jack of the same colour, the left bower, is second highest and counts as a trump rather than a member of its printed suit. A side that names trump and then fails to take three of the five tricks is euchred and the opponents score two. There is also going alone, where a player sends their partner out of the hand for a bigger score.

Why a Spades player would like Euchre: partnership trick-taking with a bidding-adjacent decision and a punishment for overreaching, compressed into hands that take two minutes. Why it is different: five tricks give you almost no room to plan, and the bowers mean the trump suit holds seven cards while one off-suit holds only five.

Callbreak, popular across Nepal and parts of India, is the closest thing to Spades on this list and the differences are exactly the ones that matter. Spades are always trump. Thirteen tricks. Follow suit if you can. But everyone plays for themselves — there are no partnerships — and there is no nil, because every player must call at least one trick.

The play rules are stricter than Spades in two ways that reshape the game. If you are void in the suit led you must play a trump if you hold one, and where possible you must play a card that beats the current highest card in the trick. That obligation to head the trick removes most of the ducking and hiding that Spades card play is built on, and it makes trump management brutally forced.

Scoring is different too. A game is normally five deals; making your call scores your call, with overtricks worth a small fraction each, and failing your call subtracts it outright. There are no bags. Highest total after five deals wins. If you like Spades bidding but find partnership dependency frustrating, this is the game to try.

Oh Hell, also published as Oh Pshaw, Blackout and half a dozen other names, takes the Spades bidding idea and makes it merciless. Every player bids the exact number of tricks they will take, and scoring rewards hitting that number precisely — overtricks are not partial credit, they are failure. There are usually no partnerships.

The hand size changes every deal, which is the mechanic that makes it work. A typical game starts at one card each, climbs to the maximum the deck allows, then descends again, with a new trump turned up each deal. A one-card hand is almost pure guesswork; a ten-card hand is a real planning problem. Many groups also play a rule preventing the dealer from bidding the number that would make the total bids equal the number of tricks, guaranteeing that at least one player must fail.

For a Spades player this is the purest possible version of the skill you already have. Spades punishes overtricks slowly through bags; Oh Hell punishes them instantly and completely. It also teaches you to actively lose tricks, which is a genuinely different craft from winning them.

Tarneeb is the major partnership trick game of the Arab world, and the name is simply the word used for trump. The most widespread form has four players in two partnerships and thirteen tricks, with an auction where players bid a minimum number of tricks starting from seven; the highest bidder names the trump suit and their side must take at least the bid. Regional and family variants differ a good deal, including a well-known version scored to 41, so it is worth agreeing rules before starting.

What a Spades player gains is the thing Spades deliberately left out: a competitive auction where winning it lets you choose the trump suit. What stays familiar is everything else, which makes Tarneeb an unusually easy step up.

Bridge is the same idea taken as far as it will go. Auctions with suit and notrump contracts, the declarer's partner exposing their hand as the dummy, doubling and redoubling, vulnerability, and bidding conventions that turn the auction into an agreed private language. It is by a wide margin the deepest game here and the only one that requires study before you can meaningfully participate. If the bid is your favourite part of Spades, Bridge is where that road ends.

Both of these swap the central accounting of the game. Instead of counting how many tricks you took, you count the value of the cards inside them, which changes what a good card is. A ten becomes a serious prize and a jack can outrank an ace.

Pinochle uses a doubled deck — 48 cards in the single-deck game, with a popular double-deck version of 80 — and adds a melding phase where you score for combinations held in hand before play begins. Partnership Pinochle keeps the four-player two-team structure a Spades player knows, but the hand has two separate jobs: declare your melds and then win the card points to protect them.

Belote, called Belot in Bulgaria where it is close to a national game, uses a 32-card deck of seven through ace, four players in partnerships, and a rank order that changes with trump: in the trump suit the jack is highest and worth 20 points and the nine is second and worth 14, while outside trump the ace leads and jacks are nearly worthless. It also enforces following suit and overtrumping much more strictly than Spades does, and it has declarations for card sequences and for holding the king and queen of trump. It is a considerably denser game than Spades and rewards memory heavily. This site runs Belot alongside Spades in the browser if you want to try it without setting up a table.

Hearts belongs on the list because every Spades player ends up at a Hearts table eventually, but it is the odd one out. There is no trump suit, no bidding, no partnerships, and tricks are not the objective — they are the hazard. Each heart taken costs a point, the queen of spades costs thirteen, the lowest score wins, and the game ends when someone reaches 100.

The one thing it shares with Spades is the discipline of counting a suit and knowing who is void. Everything else is inverted, including the instinct to win with your highest card. Play it when you want the opposite of what Spades trains you to do, or when your group is not four people and nobody wants to sit out.

If you miss having a partner and want something new tonight, play Euchre. If you want Spades without depending on a partner, play Callbreak. If bidding is the part you enjoy and you want it sharper, play Oh Hell; if you want it deeper and are prepared to study, play Bridge, with Tarneeb as the gentler intermediate step.

If you want a genuinely different accounting system and do not mind learning a new rank order, play Belote or Pinochle — they will take a few sessions to click and then they are hard to put down. And if you want to stop winning tricks altogether for an evening, play Hearts.