Easy difficulty
Aces Up
Discard cards that rank below another card of the same suit across four piles, aiming to end with only the four Aces left.
Also published as Idiot's Delight, Firing Squad, Aces High, Drivel.
- One-Deck Games
- Four-Suit Games
- Easy Solitaire
- Quick Games
- Mobile-Friendly Games
- Luck-Based Games
- Classic Solitaire
| Decks | One deck |
|---|---|
| Suits | 4 |
| Typical length | 5 min |
| Difficulty | Easy |
| How much skill matters | Low |
| How much the shuffle matters | High |
| Family | Standalone |
| Good for beginners | Yes |
There is no playable version of Aces Up on this site yet — this page covers its rules and strategy. The game suits a touchscreen well, so it is a good candidate once a build exists.
About Aces Up
Aces Up is four piles, one rule, and about a one in thirty-five chance. Deal four cards; discard any card that has a higher card of its own suit showing; move a card into an empty space when it helps; deal again. The aim is to strip the deck down to nothing but the four Aces.
It is one of the quickest games here and one of the least generous, and it has collected an unusually blunt set of alternative names along the way — Idiot's Delight, Firing Squad, Drivel. The decisions are few but not trivial: which pile to open when a space appears is genuinely the difference between a run of discards and a dead board.
How to play
Four cards are dealt face up, one to each of four piles. Whenever two or more visible cards share a suit, all but the highest-ranked of them are discarded — and Aces count high, so an Ace beats a King. You may move any pile's top card into an empty space, which often exposes a new card that lets you discard again. When you have taken everything available, deal another four cards, one onto each pile, and repeat. Win by discarding all 48 non-Ace cards so only the four Aces are left.
Strategy
The one real decision is which card to move into an empty space, and it is worth more than it looks: moving a card exposes whatever is beneath it, so the question is not which card you want to save but which pile you want to open. Prefer uncovering deep piles over shallow ones. Because Aces rank high they clear their suit of everything, so getting an Ace to the top of a pile early is worth engineering. At around 1 in 35 the odds are long — the appeal is that rounds take five minutes, not that you will win them.
What works
- Very fast — a round takes only a few minutes
- Rules learned instantly, with one genuinely meaningful decision
- Compact four-pile layout, ideal on a phone
What to know
- Around 1 in 35 win rate; most rounds end short
- Very little strategic depth beyond the empty-space choice
- Heavily dependent on the order the deck deals out
Frequently asked questions
- How many decks does Aces Up use?
- Aces Up is played with a single standard deck.
- Is Aces Up good for beginners?
- Yes — Aces Up has straightforward rules and is a reasonable game to learn early on.
- Is Aces Up based more on luck or strategy?
- Aces Up is largely determined by how the cards fall — there's limited room for strategy to change the outcome.