Hearts with Five Players
A rare fifth chair this week, a visiting cousin of one of the regulars who claimed not to know any card games and then turned out to be ruthless at hearts. Hearts for five needs a small adjustment, because 52 does not divide by five. We remove the two of clubs and the two of diamonds, leaving 50 cards and ten each. The player holding the three of clubs leads it to start. Passing is three cards to the left, as with four. It works well; five hands make the queen of spades harder to track and the game faster, with the hearts coming out earlier.
Scoring, for anyone new: each heart taken is one point, the queen of spades is thirteen, and low score wins when someone passes 100. Tonight’s game went nine hands and finished with totals of 103, 88, 74, 61 and 39. The 39 was the cousin, who took the queen exactly once and spent most of the evening giving it to the player on the left with a small smile.
The argument this time was about shooting the moon, which is when one player takes every heart and the queen in one hand. The traditional result is that each other player gets 26 points. One of us prefers the variant where the shooter subtracts 26 from their own score instead, on the grounds that it is less brutal to the table. The cousin pointed out, correctly, that with five players the first version hands out 104 points in one go and can end a game in a single hand. We tried one hand with each rule, the moon was not shot either time, and we voted. Three to two for the shooter choosing which of the two applies at the moment of scoring, which is the compromise I had expected to lose.
Two further notes. The rule that hearts cannot be led until a heart has been played, which we call breaking hearts, stays on, and we added that the queen of spades does not break hearts, which came up and had to be looked up. Second, the cards: a plastic-coated deck is now compulsory on nights with crisps. Last month’s paper deck has a greasy thumbprint on the ace of hearts that makes it the most recognizable card in the house.