How to Play TriPeaks — Rules and Tips

Clear twenty-eight cards from three peaks. A deal takes about two minutes, so it fits into any spare moment.

Rules

You can take any card that is one rank above or below the card on the waste pile. Suits don't matter.
An Ace links to both a 2 and a King. The ranks wrap around like a ring, so a single Ace can reopen a deal that looks stuck.
A card still covered by another card can't be taken. Those are the dimmed ones.
Nothing to take? Tap the stock to turn over one card. The number of cards left is shown on it.
When the stock runs out and nothing links, the deal is over.

What winners do

Take long runs

The game counts how many cards you take in a row without turning the stock. The stock is limited, so how many cards you clear per turned card is the whole game. When several cards can be taken, look at what each one opens next before you choose.

Dig up into the peaks

A card in an upper row is uncovered only when both cards directly below it are gone. Rather than taking just any bottom card, take two neighbors so the card above them opens up. Skim only the bottom row and the upper rows stay untouched. A peak's top card, on the other hand, covers nothing, so there is no hurry to take it while you have another move.

No dead end at Ace or King

Because Ace and King link, every rank has two neighbors, one up and one down. A run carries straight through Q-K-A-2, so there is no reason to hoard Aces or Kings. If you picked up that habit from Golf, or from TriPeaks apps where Ace and King don't connect, you can drop it here.

TriPeaks on this site

The upper rows are face up too

In standard TriPeaks only the bottom row is face up; the cards above are face down. But this site only opens a deal number after its solver has actually solved that deal. With face-down cards, the solver would solve the deal seeing everything while you played half blind, and the promise of "solvable deals only" would be only half kept — you could be handed a solvable deal and still lose it to bad luck.

With every card face up, you see what the solver sees. What you still don't know is the order of the stock, and that is where the tension comes from.

No undo

If you could take back a card turned from the stock, undo would really be a way to peek at the next card. The best strategy would then be to preview the whole stock before starting, which removes the only unknown in the game. A deal takes two minutes, so starting over is quicker.

Moves are really draws

Every win clears exactly twenty-eight cards, so the only thing that differs between players is how many times they turned the stock. The "fewest moves" ranking for this game is in effect a ranking of who finished with the fewest draws.

Of 5,000 deals checked, 153 (3.1%) could not be solved, and those numbers were given a different layout.