Hearts

Hearts is an early 1984 Macintosh implementation of the classic trick-taking card game by Loki Engineering Inc., one of the first card games written for the original 128K Mac and a small but charming showcase of how the new platform's mouse-and-window interface could refresh long-familiar parlor games.

Gameplay

Standard four-player Hearts is dealt: each player passes three cards, then takes tricks following suit, trying to avoid every Heart (worth one point) and the Queen of Spades (worth thirteen). The first player to reach the target score loses, and the player with the lowest total wins. Shooting the moon - taking all the penalty cards in a single hand - flips the score and dumps 26 points on the other three opponents.

Engine

The program is a small 68k application written for the original Macintosh, targeting System 1 through System 6.x with a black-and-white card-table interface, mouse-driven card play and three computer opponents. At under 30 KB it fits comfortably on a single 400K floppy and runs cleanly under Mini vMac for modern emulation.

Development

Hearts was published by Loki Engineering Inc. in 1984, alongside a small wave of independent Mac card and parlor titles that filled out the new platform's earliest software library. Macintosh Garden hosts the original 1.6 release as both a Stuffit archive and a 512K disk image preserved from period floppies.

Reception

The title is remembered as a friendly teaching version of Hearts: user notes on Macintosh Garden credit it with effectively introducing players to the rules and sparking a lasting interest in card gaming, and it carries a 4 of 5 user rating as a small but well-crafted artifact of the very first Mac software generation.