Aces Up

Aces Up (also known as Idiot's Delight, Once in a Lifetime, Ace of the Pile, Rocket to the Top, Firing Squad, Loser Solitaire, Aces High, and Drivel) is a solitaire card game using a deck of 52 playing cards.

Aces Up
A Patience game
FamilyDiscarding
DeckSingle 52-card
See also Glossary of solitaire

One advantage of this game is its minimal use of space: it requires only four piles of cards, and a place to discard cards to.

It shares the name Idiot's Delight with two other unrelated solitaire games, namely Perpetual Motion and King Albert. It shares the name Aces Up with Easthaven, which is a variation of Klondike and also unrelated to this game.

Rules
  1. Deal four cards in a row face up.
  2. If there are two or more cards of the same suit, discard all but the highest-ranked card of that suit. Aces rank high.
  3. Repeat step 2 until there are no more pairs of cards with the same suit.
  4. Whenever there are any empty spaces, you may choose the top card of another pile to be put into the empty space. After you do this, go to Step 2.
  5. When there are no more cards to move or remove, deal out the next four cards from the deck face-up onto each pile.
  6. Repeat Step 2, using only the visible, or top, cards on each of the four piles.
  7. When the last four cards have been dealt out and any moves made, the game is over. The fewer cards left in the tableau, the better. To win is to have only the four aces left.

When the game ends, the number of discarded cards is your score. The maximum score (and thus the score necessary to win) is 48, which means all cards have been discarded except for the four aces, thus the name of the game.

Variations

A much more challenging variation on Aces Up allows only the aces to be moved onto an empty pile. This makes game play much more restrictive and consequently the game can only be completed roughly once in every 270 games.

gollark: No, it does, but you're dealing with untrusted input and need safety more than an extra millisecond.
gollark: Really, applicationy stuff should be done with... not C, so C can do what it's mildly okay at, weird low level stuff.
gollark: > perl
gollark: If you just create, say, a 32kB array for some input, but it's possible to send more than that and you don't check very carefully everywhere (because C string manipulation functions are horrible and so are C strings), then BUFFER OVERFLOW!
gollark: It does it in not wildly unsafe ways.

See also
  • List of solitaires
  • Glossary of solitaire

Notes
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