PLLAY Spades
Four players, two partnerships, one trump suit. Playable preview against labelled bots: practice tables, Daily Spades, sample leagues and a skills academy. Ranked partnership play and private community tables are not available yet. No rewards, no money.
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Rules
The deal and the bid
You and the player opposite you are partners against the two players beside you. The server deals 13 cards each from a shuffle it committed to before the first card. Bidding goes once around from the dealer's left. Each player bids the tricks they expect to win. Your side's contract is both bids added together.
Playing a hand
The player to the dealer's left leads. You must follow the suit led if you can; if you cannot, you may play anything. Spades are trump: any spade beats every other suit, and the highest spade wins. You cannot lead a spade until one has been played (spades are then “broken”), unless spades are all you hold. Cards you cannot play are shown locked, with the reason.
Scoring
Make your contract: 10 points per bid trick, plus 1 for each extra trick (a bag). Miss it: lose 10 per bid trick. Collect 10 bags and lose 100 points; the bag count then starts again. A game ends when a side reaches the target (and is ahead), falls to -200, or the hand limit is reached; level at the end is a draw.
Nil and blind nil
A bid of 0 is nil: win no tricks for +100, win one and it is -100. A nil bidder's tricks never count toward the partner's contract; they are bags. Blind nil is nil bid without looking at your cards, worth +200 or -200. Each challenge sets whether nil is allowed and whether blind nil is off, always offered, or offered only to a side that trails by 100 or more. These settings are part of the rules version a game is verified against.
Clocks and reconnecting
Practice tables are untimed. On live tables each turn has 30 seconds; when it runs out the server acts for you (it looks at your cards when a blind-nil offer is open, bids 1, or plays your lowest legal card) and the match is flagged. A player who disconnects has 60 seconds to return, then a bot takes the seat and is labelled as one.
Daily Spades, leagues and the academy
Daily Spades is one hand, dealt from a seed only the server can compute, so every player gets the same cards that day. Leagues are PLLAY-written sample leagues (fixed deals, pinned nil rules) played against bots and scored on your device. The academy is scripted lessons and puzzles with a coach, judged by the server.
Ratings and fair play
Ratings are not live. Practice games are unrated. Ranked partnership matches need human-versus-human play, which needs the human multiplayer backend that is built but not switched on. Nothing on this page is rated, and no practice result affects a rating.
Team ratings (when ranked is on)
A side is rated by the average of its two players. Each player moves by their own Elo step, up for a win and down for a loss, larger while their rating is provisional. Ratings carry no monetary meaning and cannot be bought, sold or transferred.
If your partner leaves
A disclosed bot takes the seat. You do not lose rating from that match, win or lose. The player who left is rated as a loss and flagged, even if their side was winning.
Quick-chat
Ranked games allow only preset messages to your partner, chosen from a fixed list and sent by id, never typed: Good luck, Good game, Nice play, Well played, Thanks, Sorry, Ready, One moment. They are rate limited, capped per match, recorded with the game, and you can mute your partner.
Collusion checks and reports
Reviewers are alerted, never an automatic ban, when partners or opponents share a device, when a chat message is repeatedly followed by the same unusual bid or play, when the same pair is matched again and again or trades wins, or when a fixed pair's bids are implausibly accurate. Any player can report another, from a fixed list of reasons.
Replay and verification
Open “Hand and match replay” under any table to step through every trick of a finished hand. When a game ends you can download its transcript: every bid and card in order, the rules version and the shuffle seed. Replaying it reproduces the result, and any edit is detected. The server committed to the seed before the first card; that proves the deal was not changed afterwards, not that the server never looked at it.