Aces Up Solitaire

Discard and refill

How to play Aces Up

Four cards are dealt, one to each pile. Look across the four exposed cards for any two of the same suit: the lower one is discarded and the higher one stays. Repeat until nothing else can go, then deal four more cards on top and look again.

Aces are high, which is unusual and is the entire point of the game — nothing can ever remove an ace, so the four aces are the cards that survive. Everything else is trying to find a bigger card in its own suit before the deck runs out.

There are thirteen deals in a game and no redeal. You will get through them in a couple of minutes, and most of the time you will finish with rather more than four cards on the table.

Discard rules

Which cards you may discard

Discard discipline

How to actually win Aces Up

Use every space before you deal. This is the single rule that separates players who win occasionally from players who never do. The deal fills empty piles automatically, so an unused space is simply gone.

Get aces out of the way early. An ace can never be removed, so a pile with an ace at the bottom is a pile that will hold cards forever. If an ace turns up and you have a space, moving it into that space is often worth more than any removal, because it turns a permanent blockage into a clean pile.

Think before discarding a high card. A queen on top of a pile is doing useful work — it removes every lower heart that appears. Taking it off because a king appeared feels like progress and can cost you four removals later. When both cards will stay reachable, it is often right to leave the pair alone for a deal or two.

Watch the suits you have not seen. With thirteen deals and four cards each, you see the whole deck. If three high spades have already gone and there are low spades buried, those cards are never leaving — plan around them rather than hoping.

Three avoidable losses

Where Aces Up deals are thrown away

Dealing while a pile is still empty

The deal fills every pile, including the empty one, so a space you have not used is a space you have thrown away. An empty pile is the only tool in the game for reaching a buried card — spend it before you touch the deck.

Moving the wrong card into the space

Filling an empty pile with a low card gives you a card that can be removed later. Filling it with an ace gives you a pile that will never move again. Move the card whose removal you are trying to enable, not the one that is easiest to pick up.

Removing every legal card on sight

A high card on top of a pile is a weapon: it removes every lower card of its suit that appears afterwards. Discarding a queen because a king turned up can cost you the four smaller hearts you would have cleared with it over the next three deals.

The honest hit rate

Is Aces Up Solitaire winnable?

Rarely. Aces Up is one of the harder short solitaire games, and its alternate name Once in a Lifetime is a good deal more honest than Idiot's Delight. The structure is unforgiving: you cannot see what is coming, removals are forced, there is exactly one type of discretionary move, and there is no redeal.

Skill still matters, and it matters more than the game's reputation suggests — using every empty pile well is worth a large amount. But a deal that buries low cards under aces early is lost from the start, and no amount of careful play recovers it.

We do not publish a win rate. Versions that allow redeals are dramatically easier, and any figure quoted elsewhere almost certainly describes one of those rather than this page.

Other names

Idiot's Delight, Once in a Lifetime, and Firing Squad

Aces Up collected an unusual number of names for a game with such simple rules, and two of them are jokes at the player's expense.

Other quick games

Aces Up against the other short games

If you have two minutes rather than twenty, these are the games worth knowing. What separates them is how much of the outcome you actually control.

Aces Up is the least forgiving of the four and by some distance the quickest to lose. If that appeals, it is genuinely one of the best two-minute card games there is. If it does not, TriPeaks gives you far more to decide in about the same amount of time.