Hearts

Hearts is one of the best card games ever devised for four players when each is playing individually. It is a trick-taking game in which players try to avoid taking tricks that contain penalty cards.

Hearts was first recorded in America in the 1880s. Originally, each heart was a penalty card that, taken by a player in a round earned the player a -1 score, and the player with the highest score at the end of the game was the winner.

In 1909, the queen of spades was added as the highest penalty card in a variant called Black Lady, a nickname for the queen of spades. This is the variant most used in the United States the game is still called Hearts. In Black Lady, the player who took the Black Lady was awarded -13 points. In the 1920s, a variation where the player that took the jack of diamonds was awarded +10 points. Later the scoring of Hearts was reversed so that taking a heart was +1 point, taking the queen of spades was +13 points, and taking the jack of diamonds was -10 points. 

The slam known as "shooting-the-moon" first appeared in Britain in 1939 and its use has become common in modern Black Lady. In to shoot-the-moon, the players must take all the hearts and the queen of spades. If successful, the player earns -26 points. If the jack of diamonds was also taken during the hand, the player earned an additional -10 points.