Hearts

I’ll confess to being somewhat addicted to playing the trump and trick genre of card games. The ones like hearts, spades, hi-lo-jack (or pitch) and even a little bridge (though it’s been so long that I probably couldn’t remember the rules) all have a pretty similar them of a hand consisting of a series of tricks that are won and lost according certain seniority rules.

The nice thing about hearts is it’s so easy to play, since just about any Windoze machine out there has the game on it. The kids have watched me play it any one of a number of times. Now that they’re becoming more comfortable with computers, they’ve even started dabbling with the game. The boy in particular has taken an interest in hearts.

So when he started asking me questions about how to play, I decided the best way was to actually teach him. One thing I know, having tried to explain the basic rules, is that even though the concepts are simple they have their own language and to explain the language a deck is required.

So I set about explaining the makeup of the deck: the suits and the relative strength of the cards and so forth. I put a lot of emphasis on the suits, because understanding the suits is key to understanding how to play hearts. Telling them that Ace is highest, 2 is lowest and all that is pretty easy. But explaining that sometimes, because a 2 is the right suit and an Ace isn’t that the 2 still wins is bound to cause some confusion. After that, we played some dummy hands because seeing it in action is worth more than a thousand words of explanation. The lass took a keen interest and sat and watched and listened very intently as the boy and I went through a few dummy hands.

Eventually, I dealt her in as well for a dummy hand and we went through the motions several times. We played with all cards showing and didn’t keep track of scoring. Well, I didn’t keep track. The boy, on the other hand, was a human abacus making sure he always knew who had the most hearts and where the dreaded Queen of Spades ended up. At one point, when he ended up with a few hearts, he asked if we could give “the other player” some hearts so that they could tie.

Sigh.

The whole thing held their attention quite impressively and by bedtime they both seemed to grasp the concept of “highest card in the suit led.” They even remembered how the player with the 2 of Clubs always starts a new hand. Thankfully, there were no tearful episodes either. Sometimes, that’s the best to hope for.