Microsoft Hearts

Gameplay follows the rules of a version of the Black Lady variant of Hearts. When the game is first loaded, the user is prompted for their name, and then the game begins. The computer uses all three hands against the player. The game ends when at least one player has 100 or more points at the end of a hand. The winner is the one who has the fewest points.

The user is given thirteen pseudo-random playing cards, and selects any three of them to pass. For the first hand, cards are passed to the left; for the second, to the right; for the third, across; and for the fourth, the passing stage is skipped entirely, and the players keep (or "eat") their cards. On the fifth hand, the cycle starts again, passing to the left. In any case, after passing three cards, the players receive three cards, and play begins.

Hearts was first included in Windows with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Microsoft's first "network-ready" version of Windows, released in 1992, which included a new networking technology that Microsoft called NetDDE. Microsoft used Hearts to showcase the new NetDDE technology by enabling multiple players to play simultaneously across a computer network. This legacy could be seen in the original title bar name for the program, "The Microsoft Hearts Network" (although network play was removed in the Windows XP version).

Hearts was absent in all Windows NT-based OSes prior to Windows XP including Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. From the 'Help' menu, Hearts offered a quotation from Shakespeare's famous play, Julius Caesar (act III, scene ii): "I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts...". Later versions of Windows starting with Vista removed this quotation.