OBJECTIVE: The object of the game is to be the first to get rid of all the player’s cards to a discard pile.
  1. 3 Player Spades Rules
  2. What Are The Rules To Spades
  3. Military Spades Rules
  4. Ace Of Spades Military

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NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 2-7 players

NUMBER OF CARDS: 52 deck cards for 5 or less players and 104 cards for more than 5 players

RANK OF CARDS: 8 (50 points); K, Q, J (court cards 10 points); A (1 point); 10, 9, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2

TYPE OF GAME: Shedding-type

AUDIENCE: Family

Introduction:

Spades was first introduced in America in the 1930s and has maintained its popularity throughout the decades. Spades remained popular, only in America, for many decades until the 1990s when the game began to gain international fame and appreciation via the help of online spades play and tournaments. The game is traditionally played with four players, but there are other versions of the game for three, two, and six players.
  • The spades symbol was used as psychological warfare against the Viet Cong, who were highly superstitious of the symbol. In addition to that deck, there’s the famous peel-apart deck for POWs during World War II and the Aircraft Spotters Decks meant to educate the public as well as the military.
  • Download this game from Microsoft Store for Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows 10 Team (Surface Hub), HoloLens. See screenshots, read the latest customer reviews, and compare ratings for Classic Spades.
  • Spades is a trick-taking card game devised in the United States in the 1930s. It can be played as either a partnership or solo/'cutthroat' game. The object is to take at least the number of tricks (also known as 'books') that were bid before play of the hand began. In partnership Spades, the bids and tricks taken are combined for a partnership.

Traditional Spades Four Players

The Setup:

Players that are partnered together should sit across from one another. A standard pack of 52 cards is required and play will rotate clockwise.

How to Deal:

Choose a dealer at random and the deal will rotate clockwise from there after. The dealer deals towards the left until all cards are dispersed and each player has 13 cards in hand.

How to Bid:

Once players have received their cards they are required to make a bid. The objective is to gauge how many hands you think you can win. Winning a hand is called taking a trick. Partners must decide how many tricks they can take together and that is their bid. Partners are then required to match or exceed their bid to obtain a positive score. There is only one round of bidding and each person must bid. In leisure play, partners can discuss amongst themselves how many tricks they believe they can take before settling on their official bid, however, they cannot show each other their hands. There are only 13 total tricks that can be made within one game.
Nil – When a player bids nil they are stating that they will not win any tricks. There is a bonus for this kind of play if successful and a penalty if unsuccessful. The partner of the player that bids nil is not required to bid nil.
Blind Nil – A player can decide to bid nil before ever looking at their cards. This action is called a blind nil and if successfully played comes with significant bonus points. After everyone has bid, the player that bid the blind nil can exchange two cards face down with their partner before game play begins. A commonly accepted rule of thumb is that a blind nil cannot be bid unless a team is losing by 100 points or more.

How to Play:

Before the game begins players set the points needed to win. For example, a score of 500 points is common for a game but you can set whatever goal you like. The player to the left of the dealer goes first. Other players must follow the suit of the first card if they can. If a player is unable to follow suit they can play a trump card (aka a Spade) or they can play any other card of their choosing. Spades cannot lead until they have been introduced to the board as a trump card. The player that played the highest card of the suit played wins the trick, unless the suit was trumped by a spade or joker. The player that won the trick throws out the first card of the next round. The objective is to win as many tricks as you bid. The play will continue until all cards have been played.

How to Score:

Players earn 10pts for every trick bid and 1pt for every trick over that bid. For example, if a team bids 7 tricks and wins 8 they will get a total of 71pts.
When a team wins more tricks than what they bid, as in the example above, the extra trick won is called an overtrick or a bag. Common play states that if a team reached 10 bags they must deduct 100pts from their score. This makes the game more interesting by motivating the players to win the exact number of tricks that they’ve bid.
If a team is unable to meet their bid at the end of a round, they receive 0pts. For example, if a team bids five books but only gets four, then they get no points and instead receive -10 points for every book they bid.
If a player is successful in their bid of nil their team will receive 100pts. If the nil bid fails then the trick won by the nil bidder counts as a bag for the team and does not count towards the partners’ bid.
A blind nil receives 200pts if successful and a deduction of 200pts if unsuccessful.
Whichever team reaches the total number of determined winning points first, wins!
Fortification
  • Trench warfare, 1860–1918
  • Permanent fortification, 1914–45
    • Linear fortifications of World War II
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3 Player Spades Rules

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What Are The Rules To Spades

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Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
John F. GuilmartinSee All Contributors
Associate Professor of History, Ohio State University, Columbus. Author of Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century and others.
Alternative Titles: fortress, stronghold
Military spades rules

Fortification, in military science, any work erected to strengthen a position against attack. Fortifications are usually of two types: permanent and field. Permanent fortifications include elaborate forts and troop shelters and are most often erected in times of peace or upon threat of war. Field fortifications, which are constructed when in contact with an enemy or when contact is imminent, consist of entrenched positions for personnel and crew-served weapons, cleared fields of fire, and obstacles such as explosive mines, barbed-wire entanglements, felled trees, and antitank ditches.

Both field and permanent fortifications often take advantage of natural obstacles, such as canals and rivers, and they are usually camouflaged or otherwise concealed. Both types are designed to assist the defender to obtain the greatest advantage from his own strength and weapons while preventing the enemy from using his resources to best advantage.

This article discusses military fortification since the introduction of rifled artillery and small arms. For discussions of fortification up to the modern era, see military technology.

Military Spades Rules

Trench warfare, 1860–1918

The American Civil War

In the American Civil War, field fortifications emerged as an essential of warfare, with both armies employing entrenchments to an extent never before seen. Troops learned to fortify newly won positions immediately; employing spades and axes carried in their packs, they first dug rifle pits and then expanded them into trenches. Early in the war, General Robert E. Lee adopted the frontier rifleman’s breastwork composed of two logs on the parapet of the entrenchment, and many of Lee’s victories were the result of his ability to use hasty entrenchments as a base for aggressive employment of fire and maneuver. Two notable sieges, that of Vicksburg, Miss., in the west, and Petersburg, Va., in the east, were characterized by the construction of extensive and continuous trench lines that foreshadowed those of World War I. In the Cold Harbor, Va., campaign, when General Ulysses S. Grant sent his troops against Confederate earthworks, he lost 14,000 men in 13 days. Field mines and booby traps were used extensively, and trench mortars were developed to lob shells into opposing trenches.

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World War I

The lesson taught by accurate, long-range fire from entrenched positions in the American Civil War was lost on European commanders. Even the bitter experiences of appalling losses in the Crimean, Franco-German, and South African (Boer) wars failed to lessen an ardour for the theory of the offensive that was so fervent as to leave little concern for defensive tactics in the field. Few took notice of the immense casualties the Turks inflicted from behind field fortifications in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and even though the Russo-Japanese War soon after the turn of the century underscored the lethal power of the machine gun and breech-loading rifled artillery, most European commanders saw the increased firepower as more a boon to the offensive than to the defensive.

How to play spades rulesSpades rules for 2 players

The fallacy of the faith in offensive firepower was soon convincingly demonstrated. Once the French had checked the German right wing at the Marne River, the fighting degenerated into what was in effect a massive siege. For 600 miles (1,000 kilometres), from Switzerland to the North Sea, the landscape was soon scarred with opposing systems of zigzag, timber-revetted, sandbag-reinforced trenches, fronted by tangles of barbed wire sometimes more than 150 feet (45 metres) deep and featured here and there by covered dugouts providing shelter for troops and horses and by observation posts in log bunkers or concrete turrets. The trench systems consisted of several lines in depth, so that if the first line was penetrated, the assailants were little better off. Rail and motor transport could rush fresh reserves forward to seal off a gap faster than the attackers could continue forward. Out beyond the trenches and the barbed wire was a muddy, virtually impassable desert called no-man’s-land, where artillery fire soon eliminated habitation and vegetation alike. The fighting involved masses of men, masses of artillery, and masses of casualties. Toxic gases—asphyxiating, lachrymatory, and vesicant—were introduced in a vain effort to break the dominance of the defense, which was so overpowering that for more than two years the opposing lines varied less than 10 miles in either direction.

Ace Of Spades Military

During the winter of 1916–17, the Germans prepared a reserve trench system, the Hindenburg Line, containing deep dugouts where the men could take cover against artillery fire and machine guns emplaced in concrete shelters called pillboxes. Approximately two miles behind the forward line was a second position, almost as strong. The Hindenburg Line resisted all Allied assaults in 1917, including a vast British mining operation under the Messines Ridge in Belgium that literally blew up the ridge, inflicting 17,000 casualties at one blow; the advance failed to carry beyond the ridge.

Permanent fortification, 1914–45

World War I

Most defensive thinking on the eve of World War I was reserved for the permanent fort, which was designed to canalize enemy advance and to afford time for national mobilization. The leading fortification engineer of the time was a Belgian, Henri Brialmont. He placed his forts, built of concrete, at an average distance of four miles from a city, as with 12 forts at Liège, and at intervals of approximately 2.5 miles. At Antwerp his defense system was even more dense. He protected the big guns of his forts with turrets of steel and developed disappearing cupolas. Some forts were pentagonal, others triangular, with much of the construction underground.

Spades card game rules pdf

In building defenses along the frontier facing Germany, French engineers emulated Brialmont, with particularly strong clusters of fortresses at Verdun and Belfort. So monstrous were the forts of the time that they were known as “land battleships.” But by marching through Belgium with a strong right wing (the Schlieffen plan), the Germans circumvented the powerful French fortresses. Passing between the forts at Liège, which Brialmont had intended to be connected with trenches, they took the city in only three days, then systematically reduced the forts. Namur, also heavily fortified, resisted the powerful Big Bertha guns for only four days. The concrete of the Belgian fortifications crumbled under the pounding, but the French forts at Verdun, of more recent and sturdier construction, later absorbed tremendous punishment and served as focal points for some of the war’s bloodiest fighting.

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