Aces Up Solitaire

TSBy The Strategy Desk·Published April 5, 2026

Aces Up (also known as Idiot's Delight or Firing Squad) is a satisfying patience card game where you eliminate cards that are outranked by another card of the same suit. The goal is simple: clear the board until only the four Aces remain. With a win rate around 10%, every victory feels earned.

How Aces Up Works

Start with four tableau piles, each containing one card, and a stock of 48 remaining cards. On each turn, look for top cards that share a suit with another top card — the lower-ranked one can be discarded (Aces are highest). Move cards to empty piles strategically, then deal four more cards from the stock when you're ready. Keep discarding until only Aces remain — or until you get stuck.

Strategy Meets Luck

Unlike pure-chance games like Clock Solitaire, Aces Up rewards smart decisions. Choosing when to deal from the stock and how to use empty columns can make the difference between a win and a loss. But unlike FreeCell, many deals are unwinnable no matter what you do — making it a compelling blend of skill and fortune.

History & Origins

Aces Up has traveled under an unusual collection of names — Idiot's Delight, Firing Squad, Drivel, Aces High — each hinting at a different mood. The earliest print descriptions we can trace appear in nineteenth-century patience anthologies, where it was billed as a quick amusement for players who lacked the patience for Klondike. Four tableau columns, a small stock, and an objective so minimal it fits on one line: discard every non-ace card and leave the four aces standing in their columns like survivors after a firing squad. The “Drivel” nickname belongs to the British sense of the word — something trivial to talk over with tea — while “Idiot's Delight” came later, likely borrowed from the 1930s Robert Sherwood play. Windows users met the game through Microsoft Entertainment Pack collections in the early 1990s, and that exposure is where most modern players first learned the rules.

Strategic Principles

The discard rule is trivially simple — drop the lower card when two same-suit cards sit on top of their piles — but the actual skill lives in selection. Most boards present us with several legal discards at once, and we almost never want to take them all. Each discard is a choice about which card beneath we want to expose next, and those choices compound across the whole stock.

We protect kings above all other cards. A king on top of a column is inert — no suit-mate can ever outrank it — so whenever we flip a king onto a column, we plan to move it into an empty slot as soon as one appears. Empty columns are the single most valuable resource in Aces Up, and kings are their most valuable cargo. Wasting an empty slot on a lower rank (say a 6) when a king sits buried beneath junk is the classic beginner's error. We reserve vacated columns specifically for king relocation or for clearing a column that contains an ace we have not yet surfaced.

When multiple discards are available, we choose the one that frees the most productive card underneath. If discarding the 4♥ exposes another 9♥ already matched on the board, we collect the cascade. If discarding the 4♥ exposes a stranded 3♠ that cannot pair with anything, we defer that discard and take a different one first. We also keep a mental tally of which suits are running hot — if two clubs are already gone and a third is teed up, we let the clubs pile drain itself rather than diluting the discard budget across suits that are not converging.

Finally, we deal the stock conservatively. Every fresh deal paints one card on each column and often buries the very card we were about to discard. We deal only when the board is fully resolved — no more legal discards, no more productive relocations — because an early deal can bury an ace under four dead ranks and end the game on the spot.

Difficulty & Win Rate

Aces Up is one of the genuinely hard patience games. Solver studies and long-run human data converge on a win rate of roughly five to ten percent, depending on how carefully the player sequences discards and empty-column moves. Casual players often report wins in the one-to-three percent range because they discard greedily and deal aggressively; patient players who treat every empty column as a king-shelter can push their rate to the upper end of the published band. Unlike FreeCell, where the vast majority of deals are solvable and human mistakes cause losses, Aces Up is heavily shuffle-dependent: many deals are mathematically unwinnable from the first four-card deal because the stock order has buried the aces in ways no discard sequence can repair. The short runtime — a game takes two or three minutes — compensates for the brutal win percentage.

Common Mistakes

The most expensive mistake is burning an empty column on a low card. Moving a five or a six into the freshly opened slot feels like progress, but it deprives us of the one tool we have for evicting a king later. A second mistake is discarding greedily: taking every legal discard in sequence without checking what each one exposes. A third is dealing the stock to unstick a single stall, when waiting one more careful move would have produced a legal discard. We also see players ignore suit tallies — they keep pairing hearts while clubs are quietly piling up, and then cannot recover when the clubs column stalls completely. Finally, many players forget the ace-survival goal. Every move should be judged by whether it brings us closer to leaving four aces — not four low cards, not four mixed-rank survivors — on the table. Moves that merely tidy the board without protecting aces or releasing kings are moves we cannot afford to make.

How This Game Compares

Compared to Klondike, Aces Up is faster, harsher, and far more luck-driven. Klondike rewards patient sequencing and offers redeals; Aces Up offers neither. Compared to FreeCell, the skill ceiling is dramatically lower because we see only four tops at a time — the rest of the board is invisible stock. Compared to Golf Solitaire or TriPeaks, which also work around discarding to clear the board, Aces Up dispenses with the wild-card mechanic: there is no reserve pile to pull from, only the stock deal and the discard rule. Clock Solitaire is the closest cousin in luck-dependence, but Clock has zero decisions; Aces Up has a handful of genuine choices per turn and thereby keeps us engaged. If we were ranking pure patience games by how much a skilled player can lift the win rate above chance, Aces Up sits roughly five percentage points above random play — modest, but enough to make the deliberate game feel meaningful.

Variant Notes

A few Aces Up variants soften the brutal base rate. “Aces Up with Reserve” allows one slot to be used as a temporary holding cell, nudging the win rate above fifteen percent. “Triple Aces Up” deals three cards per turn instead of four, slightly thinning the deadlock risk. Some digital editions allow cards to move between columns beyond just king relocation, which erodes the empty-column discipline but makes the game friendlier for first-timers. Our edition follows the traditional ruleset: four columns, four-card deals, Aces high, and only full-column moves between tableau piles. That preserves the tension the game has carried since the Victorian compilers first wrote it down.

Learn More

• How to Play Aces Up Solitaire — Complete rules, strategy tips, and history
• Aces Up Strategy Guide — Tips and winning tactics
• Play La Belle Lucie — Fan patience with same-suit building and the merci rule
• Play FreeCell — The classic strategic solitaire
• Types of Solitaire — Explore 20+ solitaire variants