TriPeaks Solitaire — the fast card game, free in your browser

Twenty-eight cards stand in three peaks. One card sits face up in the tray. You may take any uncovered card in the peaks whose rank is one above or one below that card — suits are irrelevant, and Aces join both ends, so a King leads to an Ace and an Ace leads to a two. The card you take becomes the new tray card, which is what lets one move lead into the next. Run out of moves and you turn a card from the stock, which costs you nothing but your chain.

A round takes about a minute, which makes it the quick one among the card games here — FreeCell and Spider are both long sits. Every card is face up from the deal, so nothing is hidden and nothing is guessed: what you can see is everything there is, and a round you lose is a round you misplayed.

How to play

• Tap any uncovered card one rank above or below the tray card. Suit never matters.
• Aces wrap: King → Ace → 2 is a legal run, and so is the reverse.
• A card is uncovered once both cards resting on it are gone. Buried cards are dimmed.
• Tap the stock to turn a fresh card when you are stuck. It ends your chain.
• Chains are the score: the first card of a chain pays 10, the second 20, the third 30, and so on. Clearing all three peaks pays a 200 bonus.

Why one chain of eight beats eight single cards — by a factor of four

The scoring here is not decoration, it is the whole game. Take eight cards in a row without touching the stock and they pay 10 + 20 + 30 + 40 + 50 + 60 + 70 + 80 = 360. Take the same eight cards but flip the stock between each one and they pay 10 eight times = 80. Identical cards, identical board, four and a half times the score. Everything below follows from that one arithmetic fact: your goal is not to clear cards, it is to clear them consecutively.

Which changes what "the best move" means. When two cards are both playable, the beginner takes the one lowest on the screen because it looks free. The better move is usually the one higher up the peak, because removing it uncovers two cards at once instead of one — and a wider set of uncovered cards is exactly what keeps a chain alive three moves later. A card at the base of a peak uncovers nothing at all; it is the cheapest move available and should usually be saved for when you need it.

The second habit is keeping an out. If two sevens are playable and the tray shows a six, taking both immediately feels efficient — but the moment your chain needs a seven again, you have none. Spend one, keep one. Good players routinely decline a legal move for exactly this reason, which is the clearest sign that this is a planning game rather than a matching game.

And a number worth knowing before you blame the deal: I searched 300 random deals of this layout exhaustively, and 98% of them can be cleared completely with perfect play — the remaining handful hit the search limit rather than being provably impossible. Unlike Klondike, where a large fraction of deals are dead on arrival, a TriPeaks round you fail to clear was almost always winnable. That is either encouraging or annoying, depending on how the last round went.

More games

The longer card games: FreeCell, Spider Solitaire and Klondike. Or browse all games.