Question: can you lead with a spade in spades

Answer: Yes, A common variant rule, borrowed from Hearts, is that a player may not lead Spades until a Spade has been played to trump another trick. This prevents a player who is ``long'' in Spades (having a large number of them) from leading Spades one after the other at the beginning of the hand to deplete them and thus prevent other players using them as trumps. The act of playing the first Spade in a hand is known as ``breaking Spades'', derived from its parent rule, ``breaking Hearts''. When a player leads with a spade (after spades has been broken), the other players must follow suit.