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Aces Up is about as simple as a card game gets, and it plays in a couple of minutes. Four piles, one rule for discarding, and one precious move for empty piles.
Most deals come down to how you use your empty columns. Moving the wrong card into one can bury the very card you needed to expose.
Four cards are dealt face up in a row, one per column. The other 48 stay in the stock and come out four at a time.
You win when the 48 other cards are discarded and only the four Aces remain. The game ends when the stock is empty and no move is left.
We ran our own solver on 200 shuffled deals of this version. It found a win in 7 of 200 (4%), and ran out of its budget of 20,000 positions a deal on 193.
Those undecided deals may still be winnable, so treat the win count as a minimum. The solver can see every card, including face-down ones, so it measures what the cards allow, not how often a person will win.
First recorded in England as Drivel Patience by Mary Whitmore Jones in 1900. It has also been called Idiot's Delight and Firing Squad.
Love Aces Up? Try these other solitaire variants on Solitaire Scramble:
High. An Ace beats every other card of its suit, which is why the Aces are the only cards left at the end of a winning game.
Yes, the top card of any column with more than one card. A harder version of the game only allows Aces there, but that isn't what this version uses.
Usually two to four minutes.
Both. Most of the outcome is set by the deal, but your use of empty columns often decides the close games.