Aces Up is a quick and simple, one-pack,

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. One advantage of Aces Up is its minimal use of space: it requires only four piles of cards, and a place to discard cards to. Winning chances with good play are about 1 in 10 games.

Names

Aces Up is also known as Aces High, Idiot's Delight, Firing-SquadWood & Goddard (1940), p. 255. and DrivelParlett (1979), p. 181. or Drivel Patience. It shares the name Idiot's Delight with two other unrelated solitaire games,

Perpetual Motion Perpetual motion is the motion of bodies that continues forever in an unperturbed system. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work infinitely without an external energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, a ...

and King Albert. It shares the name Aces Up with Easthaven, which is a variation of Klondike and is also unrelated.

History

The rules are first recorded in England as Drivel Patience by

Mary Whitmore Jones Mary Elizabeth Whitmore Jones ( 1823 – 1915) was an English author and the first female heir of Chastleton House. She was unmarried and did not have any children.Whitmore Jones (1900), pp. 77–78. In 1940, Wood & Goddard describe it under the name of Firing Squad, but most later authors call it Aces Up, while sometimes acknowledging its earlier names. Spadaccini (2005) is an exception, calling the game Idiot's Delight and giving alternative names as Aces Up and Aces High.Spadaccini (2005), pp. 344–345.

Rules

Gameplay for Aces Up works as follows: # Deal four cards in a row face up. # If there are two or more cards of the same suit, discard all but the highest-ranked card of that suit. Aces rank high. # Repeat step 2 until there are no more pairs of cards with the same suit. # 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. # When there are no more cards to move or remove, deal out the next four cards from the deck face-up onto each pile. # Repeat Step 2, using only the visible, or top, cards on each of the four piles. # 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."Four Ace Patience" in This makes game play much more restrictive and consequently the game can only be completed roughly once in every 270 games.

References

Literature

Parlett, David David Parlett (born 18 May 1939 in London) is a games scholar, historian, and translator from South London, who has studied both card games and board games. He is the president of the British Skat Association. His published works include many pop ...

(1979). ''The Penguin Book of Patience'', Penguin, London. {ISBN 0-7139-1193-X * Spadaccini, Stephanie (2005). ''The Big Book of Rules''. London, NY: Penguin. ISBN 0-452-28644-1 *