The colour of the place was in the walls and men. Each of them wore a silk jupon blazoned with the chevron and the three thistles, distinguished in the case of the younger brothers with various labels of cadency, so that they looked like a hand of playing cards spread out. They were the Gawaine family, and, as usual, they were quarrelling.
T.H. White, The Candle in the Wind
A man who aims at love through chivalric exploits gambles for high stakes.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
Hearts (or specifically the variant known as Black Lady) is a card game where you attempt to avoid taking tricks that include any Heart cards or the Queen of Spades (who has the highest penalty and is the titular Black Lady). In a rare and extremely high risk strategy, a player may also attempt to get all the penalty cards - called shooting the moon - at which point they take no penalty and all their opponents take it instead.1
It was invented in the last few centuries - thoroughly modern - so why does it have a page here in this Medieval roleplaying game?
Because despite the anachronism, it’s really evocative. Playing cards gained popularity in the later Middle Ages - often decried as a sign of societal degeneracy; and in the Arthurian story the latter years are a story of a creeping decadence. This period is also a time of high ideals about love, or at least romance, and secret affairs.
So the game is about the Great Court of Love2 and represents the dangerous fires of courtly love in this later cynical-but-passionate period. You don’t want to pick up any risky scandals, but often can’t avoid it, the queen herself is the most dangerous card of them all… and maybe, just maybe, if you just got it all you’d actually pull it off.
Footnotes
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In practice this forces a little more strategy and game theory from the players who are doing well for themselves - at some point you need the player who’s doing the worst to not get another penalty - but is usually easy to thwart and not something you intentionally target. ↩