The Spades Glossary
Every game in the Spades family leans on the same handful of words: bid, trick, trump, Nil, bag, set. Learn those and the rules of any variant read like plain English. This glossary defines the terms you will meet at the table, from your very first bid to the finer points of Whiz, Mirror and the joker game. If you are brand new, skim it before you dive into the full Spades rules or the FAQ - the vocabulary will already make sense.
💡 Learn these six first: bid, trick, trump, Nil, bag and set. Almost every rule and every scrap of strategy is built from those six ideas.
Bidding and contracts
Bid
The number of tricks you promise to win in a hand. You call a bid from Nil (zero) up to thirteen, and it becomes your share of the team's promise for that deal.
Contract
The combined number of tricks a partnership must win, formed by adding the two partners' bids together. Make the contract and you score; fall short and you are set.
Nil
A bid of zero - a promise to win no tricks at all. Making it earns a bonus, usually 100 points, while winning even a single trick busts it for the same penalty.
Blind Nil
A Nil declared before you look at your cards. It doubles the stakes, typically 200 points won or lost, and is usually a gamble a trailing team takes to claw back a lead.
Cover
To win, as the Nil bidder's partner, the tricks your teammate cannot safely avoid, so their zero survives. Covering is the central duty of anyone whose partner has bid Nil.
Whiz bid
A forced bid used in Whiz Spades: you must bid exactly the number of spades you were dealt, or bid Nil instead. There is no third option and no judgment call.
Mirror bid
A forced bid that goes one step further than Whiz: your bid is always exactly the number of spades in your hand, with no Nil escape, so the bid mirrors your trump length.
Overbid / Underbid
Bidding more tricks than you can win risks a set; bidding fewer than you can win piles up bags. Accurate bidding threads the needle between the two.
Board (10 for 200)
Shorthand for standard trick-value scoring - ten points for each trick in your bid - often quoted alongside a point target such as 200 or 500 that ends the match.
Tricks, trump and the play
Trick
One round of play in which every player contributes a single card. The highest card of the led suit wins it, unless a spade is played, in which case the highest spade wins.
Book
Another word for a trick - the cards gathered together after one round of play. Your bid is really a promise of how many books your side will take.
Trump
The suit that outranks every other for the whole hand. In Spades the trump suit is fixed forever: any spade beats any heart, diamond or club.
Following suit
The rule that you must play a card of the suit that was led if you hold one. Only when you are void in that suit may you trump it or discard.
Void
Having no cards left in a particular suit. A void is powerful, because it lets you trump whenever that suit is led instead of being forced to follow.
Broken spades
Spades are 'broken' the first time a spade is played on a trick where a player could not follow the led suit. Until they are broken, no one may lead a spade to a new trick.
Leader
The player who plays the first card to a trick and so chooses the suit that must be followed. Winning a trick makes you the leader of the next one.
Ruff
To play a spade on a trick because you cannot follow the led suit, winning it with trump. Sometimes called cutting the suit.
Cut
To ruff - to seize a trick by playing a spade when you are void in the suit that was led.
Deuce
The two of a suit, normally the lowest card. In Joker Joker Deuce Deuce, two deuces are promoted into the spade suit and rank near the very top of trump.
Big Joker / Little Joker
In the joker variant, the two jokers are the highest trumps of all. The big joker outranks the little joker, and both beat even the ace of spades.
Scoring, bags and penalties
Set
Failing to win as many tricks as your side bid. Being set costs ten points for every trick you promised, and it is the single largest swing in the game.
Bag / Sandbag
An overtrick - a trick won beyond your bid. Each bag is worth one point right now, but it quietly counts toward a heavy penalty.
Bag penalty
The cost of hoarding overtricks. Every time your accumulated bags reach ten, your side is docked 100 points and the bag count drops back by ten.
Overtrick
A trick taken above the number your side bid. Because overtricks become bags, winning more tricks than you need is not always a good thing.
Boston
Winning all thirteen tricks in a single hand - a clean sweep of the table. Some house rules award a special bonus for pulling one off.
Renege
Failing to follow suit when you actually could have - an illegal play, usually penalized. Also called a revoke; on this site the software prevents it.
Target score
The point total that ends the match, most commonly 250 or 500. The first partnership or player to reach it wins the game.
Seats, teams and formats
Partnership
The standard four-player structure, with two fixed teams seated across from each other who add their bids into one combined contract.
Cutthroat
Any everyone-for-themselves format with no partnerships, such as Solo Spades or the three-handed game, where no one is obligated to help you.
Solo
Four-player Spades played without teams: every player bids and scores individually. It is the same game as Cutthroat.
Suicide
A partnership format in which exactly one player on each team must bid Nil every single hand, so two zeros are always live on the table.
Honeymoon Spades
A nickname for the two-player, draw-based version of the game, prized as a serious card game for two.
Draw phase
The hand-building stage in two-player Spades where players alternately take a card from the stock and keep it or discard it, until each has built a hand of thirteen.
That is the working vocabulary of Spades. Keep this page open in a tab the first few times you play a new variant and the words will stick fast. Ready to put them to use? Deal a hand of Partnership Spades, read the full rules, or browse every version on the all-variants page.