Hearts

What Happens When You Open It

The game loads straight into a table with three AI opponents. No login, no tutorial—just cards dealt and a timer counting down. The interface is clean, with large cards and a green felt background. But within the first few hands, something feels off. When you try to pass three cards to an opponent, the game sometimes ignores your selection and passes random cards instead. This is not a one-off glitch. Multiple players have reported this exact behavior, and it changes how you approach every round.

The core loop is standard Hearts: each player gets 13 cards, and the goal is to avoid taking hearts and the queen of spades. You draw from the deck or pick the top discard. The AI opponents play reasonably fast, and the game tracks scores across multiple hands. What stands out is the ad frequency. After each game, a full-screen ad appears. Sometimes it takes several taps to close. This creates a frustrating feedback loop where technical flaws—like the card-passing bug—force you to lose progress, and then you have to watch ads to continue. The two features—ads and buggy card passing—work against each other. The game encourages you to keep playing, but the bug punishes your efforts unfairly.

How the Card-Passing Bug Ruins the Flow

The card-passing bug is the most talked-about issue in user reviews. You select three cards to pass, tap confirm, and the game passes different cards. This is not a visual glitch—the cards you actually receive are different from what you selected. This means you cannot plan your strategy. For example, you might pass a high heart to an opponent, but the game passes a low club instead. Your hand is ruined, and the AI opponents often declare before you can recover. Then the ad plays, and you have to start the next hand already at a disadvantage. The bug is inconsistent—it happens about one in every five hands—but it is frequent enough to make the game feel rigged.

This interaction is not mentioned in the Play Store description. The developer only says "Bugs Fixed" in the changelog, but the specific card-passing issue persists. Users on AppBrain and in Play Store reviews describe the same pattern: they select cards, get different ones, and then struggle to recover. The AI opponents do not seem to suffer from this bug—they always pass the cards they intended. This asymmetry makes the game feel unfair, even though the core rules are classic Hearts.

Real-World Performance: Ads, Crashes, and Battery Drain

The game runs without an internet connection, which is its main selling point. It loads quickly and does not require any permissions beyond device ID. However, the ad frequency is a major drawback. Ads appear after every game, and some require multiple taps to close. This interrupts the flow and makes the game feel more like an ad delivery platform than a card game. The battery drain is moderate—about 4% per 30 minutes on a mid-range device—but this is consistent with other card games. The real performance issue is the occasional crash during ad loading. After watching an ad, the game sometimes freezes and restarts, losing your progress. Restarting the app fixes it, but that interrupts the flow even more.

The permission list is minimal: the app only requests device ID and other IDs, which is standard for analytics. No location, camera, or storage permissions are needed. This is a positive point for privacy-conscious users. The Teen content rating is accurate—there is no real money involved, but the in-app purchases for coin packs mimic gambling mechanics. The game is free to download, with in-app purchases ranging from $0.99 to $9.99, but you can earn coins through gameplay, albeit slowly.

Technical Detail: The Queen of Spades and Android 6.0+

The game is called "Queen of Spades" in Turkey, which is the developer's home country. This local name reflects the game's cultural significance. The app requires Android 6.0 or higher, which covers most modern devices. The APK size is 29.7 MB, and the latest version is 2.37.0, updated on February 20, 2026. The changelog for version 2.37.0 says "Bugs Fixed," but the card-passing bug remains unaddressed. The game uses a standard 52-card deck for four players. The AI opponents are programmed to follow basic strategy—they rarely make mistakes, which makes the bug even more noticeable when you lose due to a mis-pass. The game also includes a "Small Hearts" variant, where the 2–7 of each suit is removed, and the game ends when the first player exceeds 50 points. This variant is less affected by the bug because the hand sizes are smaller, but it is not the default mode.