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Peaks
Cards · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
Three overlapping pyramids of cards and one card face up at the bottom. Anything exactly one rank above or below it comes off, and becomes the new target. That is the whole rule, and it builds the longest chains of any solitaire.
Where it comes from
Peaks is a young game by the standards of card play: Robert Hogue, a software engineer, designed TriPeaks in 1989. It is a deliberate crossing of two older solitaires — the layout comes from Pyramid, the one-up-one-down matching rule comes from Golf — and the combination turned out to be far better than either parent.
It reached the world the same way Minesweeper did, by being included with Windows: TriPeaks shipped in Microsoft’s Windows Entertainment Pack 3, and much later became one of the standard games in the Microsoft Solitaire Collection, which is how it ended up on hundreds of millions of machines.
The detail that makes it a good game is one Hogue measured rather than guessed. He ran the deals through a computer and found that over ninety per cent of them can be completely cleared with correct play. Most solitaires are nowhere near that — classic Klondike is won well under half the time — and the difference changes what losing means. In Klondike, losing is usually the deal. Here, it is usually you.
How to play
| The layout | Three peaks built of overlapping cards, with a row along the bottom. A card is playable when nothing covers it. |
|---|---|
| The rule | Take any exposed card that is exactly one rank above or one rank below the card on the waste pile. |
| Wrapping | Ace counts both ways: king–ace–two is a legal run. |
| Stuck | Turn a new card from the stock. You have a limited number of them, so each one is a real cost. |
| Winning | Clear all three peaks. |
Suits do not matter at all. Only rank does.
Our version
The full three-peak layout with cards that are readable on a phone, and the run length shown as it builds, because a nine-card chain is the thing worth playing for.
Three things that help
Look for the longest run, not the next card. Before you touch anything, trace where each possible first card would lead. Two moves that look identical often differ by six cards.
Dig the peaks, not the bottom row. The bottom row stays playable almost to the end. Cards buried under a peak do not, and running out of stock with a covered peak is how most games are lost.
A card that opens two others is worth more than a card that opens one. Peaks is a game about uncovering, and the matching is just how you pay for it.