Spades Glossary: Every Term a New Player Will Hear
From "bag" to "sandbagging" to "set" — the vocabulary of Spades in plain language, with the scoring consequence of each term.
Spades has a small but precise vocabulary, and most of it describes things that cost or earn points. This glossary covers the terms you will hear at a table or read in a lobby, grouped by what they affect. Every definition below matches the numbers used on this site (Standard tier). Where a term has a wider life outside Spedes, we keep the meaning used in the Wikipedia article on Spades .
Bid : The number of tricks you commit to winning, 0–13. Two partner bids form one team contract.. Nil : A bid of zero tricks. Worth +75 if you take none, −75 if you take even one.. Blind Nil : A Nil declared before looking at your cards. Pays double: +150 or −150.. Contract : The combined bid of a partnership. If you bid 3 and your partner bids 4, the contract is 7.. Overbid : Bidding more tricks than your hand can take — the most common losing habit in the game.. Underbid : Bidding fewer than your hand can take. Safer than overbidding, but it produces bags.
Bag : An overtrick. Worth +1 immediately, but every tenth bag costs the team −50.. Sandbagging : Deliberately underbidding to collect overtricks. Punished by the ten-bag penalty.. Set : Failing to make your contract. Costs 10 points per trick bid, with no partial credit.. Break (a Nil) : Forcing a Nil bidder to win a trick, usually by leading a suit they are short in.. Cover : Taking tricks your Nil partner cannot avoid, protecting their Nil.. Target score : The total that ends the match: 150 on Standard, 100 on Beginner, 300 on Ranked.. Floor : The negative score that loses the match immediately (−100 on Beginner, −150 on Standard).
Trump : The suit that beats all others. In Spades this is always spades, permanently.. Break spades : The first time a spade is played in a hand. Until then, spades cannot be led.. Follow suit : Playing a card of the suit that was led, which you must do if you can.. Void : Holding no cards of a suit. A void lets you trump that suit.. Singleton / Doubleton : Holding exactly one, or exactly two, cards of a suit.. Ruff / Trump : Playing a spade on a non-spade lead because you are void.. Discard / Slough : Throwing a card of another suit when you cannot follow. It cannot win the trick.. Renege : Failing to follow suit when you could have. Usually forfeits the hand.. Lead : The first card of a trick, and the player who plays it.. Second hand low : The standard principle of playing your lowest card in second position.. Honour : An ace, king, queen or jack — the cards that usually decide tricks.. Winner : A card that will take a trick on its own, such as an ace or a spade above those outstanding.
Partnership : The standard game: four players, two teams of two.. Solo / Cutthroat : No partnerships. Each player bids and scores alone.. Mirror : You must bid the number of spades in your hand; overtricks cost −5 each.. Whiz : You may bid only Nil or your spade count.. Joker : A variant with two jokers ranked above the ♠A; the ♦2 and ♣2 are removed.. Tier : The difficulty setting that sets the numbers: Beginner, Standard or Ranked.. Dealer : The player who deals; bidding starts to their left and the deal rotates clockwise each hand.
The four terms that matter most if you learn nothing else: bid , bag , set and Nil . Everything else in Spades vocabulary describes variations on those four. See the scoring cheatsheet for the numbers behind each.
Signal : Information sent by the card you choose to play, within the rules. Legal and expected.. High-low : Playing a high card then a low one to show you held exactly two of a suit.. Come-on : An unusually high card played to encourage your partner to lead that suit again.. Peter : Another name for the high-low signal, borrowed from whist.. Table talk : Anything said about your hand. Not allowed — communication must be card-based only.. Shooting the moon : A Hearts term: taking every penalty card to reverse the scoring.
Four numbers cover almost every scoring situation you will meet: ten points per trick bid, the same amount deducted if you miss, one point per overtrick, and fifty lost at the tenth overtrick. Learn those and you can follow any Spades scoreboard, at any table, in any app. The complete rules use the same four numbers, and Partnership is the mode they were written for.
Signals are worth learning once the basics are automatic, and not before. A signal your partner misreads is worse than no signal, and most online tables are played with strangers who will not know your conventions. The universally understood message is simply playing your lowest card — it says, without ambiguity, that you do not control that suit. The agreed conventions are listed in partnership rules .
If a term you heard at a table is missing here, it is probably a local house name for one of the concepts above — or a variant rule specific to that app. Our Spades Plus comparison covers the naming differences you will meet on mobile, where "sandbag" and "bag" are used interchangeably. For the numbers behind every scoring term here, see the scoring cheatsheet .
Frequently asked questions
What does Nil mean in Spades?
A bid of zero tricks. You must win no tricks at all for the whole hand. It pays +75 if successful and costs −75 if you take even one trick (Standard tier).
What is a bag in Spades?
An overtrick — a trick won above your bid. Each bag is worth 1 point, but accumulating ten costs the team 50 points.
What does it mean to be set in Spades?
You failed to make your contract. The penalty is 10 points for every trick you bid, regardless of how close you came.
What is sandbagging?
Deliberately bidding low so you collect overtricks. The ten-bag penalty exists specifically to punish this strategy.
What does "break spades" mean?
The first time a spade is played in a hand. Until spades are broken, no one may lead a spade.
What is a renege?
Failing to follow the led suit when you held a card of it. In most rulesets a renege forfeits the hand to the opponents.
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