Strategy
Aces Up strategy: how to win more often
Short answer
Discard everything you can before each deal, use empty piles to free an Ace or to start a chain of discards, keep high cards of each suit showing, and save Jokers for the end of the deck. Good choices roughly triple your win rate compared with playing at random, but most deals still can't be won, so judge yourself by your score as much as by wins.
What strategy can and can't do
Aces Up has very few decisions. Discards are almost always right, so the real choices are which card to move into an empty pile and when to deal. Those few choices still matter. In our simulation of 100,000 games under the app's rules, a player who fills empty piles at random wins about 0.55% of games, roughly 1 in 180. A player who follows the habits below wins about 2%, roughly 1 in 50. That is more than three times as many wins.
The ceiling is low, though. Even a player who could see every card in advance could win only 11.6% of deals. So a loss usually means the shuffle beat you, not that you misplayed. The odds study has the full numbers.
1. Discard everything before you deal
Every deal drops a card on all four piles, which covers every top card on the table. Any card you could have discarded but didn't is now buried and needs another higher card of its suit to show up at the right moment. Before you tap the deck, scan the four tops for any pair of matching suits, and keep scanning after each discard, because the card underneath may open another one.
2. Use an empty pile before the next deal fills it
An empty pile does not stay empty: the next deal puts a card in it whether you used the space or not. So an empty pile is a free move you have to spend now. Look for the top card whose departure helps most, then move it. If nothing helps, dealing is fine, but check first.
3. Give each Ace a pile of its own
The game ends with one Ace alone in each pile, so an Ace sitting on top of other cards is a problem waiting to happen: everything under it is stuck until the Ace moves. When an Ace lands on a pile that has cards beneath it, plan to move it into the next empty space. An Ace that is already the bottom card of its pile is perfectly placed; leave it there.
An Ace on top is also your best discarding tool, because it outranks every card of its suit. Moving it into a space of its own keeps it on top for the rest of the game.
4. Prefer moves that start a chain
When you have a choice of cards for an empty pile, look one or two cards deep. Which move uncovers a card that can be discarded right away, and does that discard uncover another? A move that sets off three discards is worth far more than one that sets off none. Counting the chain each candidate move starts is most of what separates the skilled player in our simulation from the random one.
5. Keep high cards showing
A card can only be discarded while a higher card of its suit is on top of another pile. Kings and Queens are what clear a suit when its Ace hasn't surfaced. Avoid burying a high card under a low card of a different suit if you have a choice, and watch for a high card stuck beneath lower cards of its own suit: those lower cards can't use it, and need help from another pile.
6. Don't shuffle lone cards around
Moving a pile's only card into an empty space just swaps which pile is empty. It changes which pile the next deal's cards land on, but without knowing the order of the deck that is a guess, not a plan. Spend empty piles on moves that uncover something.
7. Count what's gone
Keep a rough count of which high cards of each suit have already been discarded. If the King and Queen of diamonds are gone and the Ace of diamonds is buried under a club, a low diamond on top of a pile may be stuck until that Ace comes out. Knowing that tells you which pile to dig into with your next empty space.
8. Save Jokers for the end
In Aces Up Solitaire, a Joker clears every card except the Aces from one pile. It's tempting to use one the first time a pile gets tall, but the best moment is usually after the last deal, when nothing else can move. That's when one Joker on the pile hiding the most cards can turn a near miss into a win.
In our simulation, the same skilled player who wins about 2% of games without help wins about 15% when one Joker is saved for the end, and about 82% with three. Streak rewards and rewarded videos keep a few Jokers in your pocket for exactly this.
Know when the game is over
Once the deck is gone, every pile has at least one card and no two top cards share a suit, nothing more can happen. Rather than staring at it, note your score (cards discarded, out of 48) and deal a new game. Tracking your score is a better measure of improvement than wins alone, because wins are rare even for strong players.