YMMV / Hearts

• Popular Game Variant: There are many variants.
  • "Left Right Across Keep": Before each hand, three cards are swapped to another player in the mentioned order (withheld on the fourth hand).
  • The jack of diamonds (or sometimes the ten) is worth minus 10 points; anyone managing to Shoot the Moon and get the jack of diamonds gets his choice of whether to take a minus 36 to his score, a minus 10 to his score and plus 26 to everyone else, or a plus 36 to everyone else. Another is Shooting the Sun, in which you take every trick, which is worth twice as much but otherwise identical to Shooting the Moon. Even the queen of spades as a penalty card wasn't part of the original rules (it used to be that the only penalty cards were the hearts).
  • Omnibus Hearts codified several house rules, including the Queen of Spades as the 13-point penalty, the Jack of Diamonds as -10 points, Shoot the Moon, card passing, and opening with the 2 of clubs. The Microsoft game is basically Omnibus on the computer.
  • One such house rule acts as an Obvious Rule Patch: if you shoot the moon, you can choose to subtract 26 points from your own score instead of adding 26 points to everyone else's score. This is to prevent a case where shooting the moon puts someone over 100 points, but the lowest score does not belong to the one who shot the moon.
  • Parker Brothers released a deck of cards called "Royal Hearts" that marked the 2 of Clubs as "Must lead first", used "Shoot the Moon"^note but note that the alternate Queens could change the value of doing such and had 4 alternate Queen Cards which could be substituted for the standard Queen cards^note what's more, you didn't have to use all 4— as seen, using Queen of Spades and Queen of Hearts only would tend to speed games way up!:
    • Queen of Spades, "Most Evil": Worth 26 points instead of 13 if taken!
    • Queen of Clubs, "Most Kind": Taking the Queen of Clubs and the Queen of Spades in the same trick let them cancel each other out (0 points for taking Spades);
    • Queen of Diamonds, "Best Friend": -10 points, basically standing in for the Jack of Diamonds (which is not a special card in this deck);
    • Queen of Hearts, "Broken Hearted": The person who takes the Queen of Hearts doubles the point score of all hearts they have taken (but not the Queen of Spades in either form). Yes, that means Shooting the Moon with this Queen and the Most Evil Queen of Spades is 52 points if you don't play with (or don't take) the Kind Queen of Clubs and the Best Friend Queen of Diamonds.
• That One Attack: Shooting the Moon, where you win all 13 Hearts and the Queen of Spades, gives everyone else 26 points and you no points.