Dogmelon Solitaire

Tri Peaks Solitaire

Tri Peaks Solitaire is a popular one deck solitaire game, combining elements of Pyramid Solitaire and Golf Solitaire. Unlike many other solitiare games, Tri Peaks Solitaire has a great scoring system, which really encourages you to keep playing, trying to get a better score.

Aim:

The aim of Tri Peaks Solitaire is to move all the cards from the tableau to the waste, at the same time as maximizing your score.

How to Play:

Tri Peaks Solitaire is an elimination game. The top card of the waste is face up, and any card of neighbouring rank can be moved onto the waste. The tableau is made up of 3 pyramids. Like Pyramid Solitaire, you can only select cards that don't have cards on top of them. Unlike Pyramid, in Tri Peaks Solitaire a King can be moved onto an Ace, and vice-versa.

To finish Tri Peaks Solitaire, all cards must be eliminated from the tableau, and the cards must be dealt from the talon.

Scoring

The way to maximize your score in Tri Peaks Solitaire is to form long sequences of moves where you only remove cards from the tableau. This is because when you have a sequences of moves from the tableau, the score you get for each move keeps incrementing.

The first card you move from the tableau will give you one point.

The next card you move from the tableau will give you 2 points, and the next card after that will give you 3.

If you deal a card from the talon, you will lose 5 points, and you will break the sequence, so the next card you remove from the talon will only score you one point.

When you remove the first peak from the talon, you will get 15 points. When you remove the second peak, you will get a further 15 points, and when you remove the last peak, you will get 30 points.

Strategy:

To maximize your score in Tri Peaks Solitaire, try to form long sequences of moves from the talon. It can sometimes pay to deliberately not move a card to the waste, because it could be used to form an even longer sequence later.

Example:

Suppose that the initial tri peaks deal looks like this:

The starting layout for Tri Peaks Solitaire, deal #1

We start by moving one of the 10s, which adds 1 onto our score:

After moving the 10 of clubs

We now select a Jack. This is the second move in the sequence, so 2 gets added to our score:

After moving the jack of Spades

We now might move a 10(adding 3 to our score), a Jack(adding 4 to our score), and then a queen(adding 5 to our score):

The key to getting good scores in Tri Peaks Solitaire is to form as long a sequence as possible...

At this point, there are no more cards we can move from the tableau, so we have to deal a card, this will take 5 off our score, and the sequence will go back to 1.

...Eventually the sequence ends though, and you must deal from the talon again

The deal from the talon gave us a 6, so we can now move the 5 of clubs. Because the sequence was restarted though, we only get 1 point.

After moving the 5 of clubs... The sequence got restarted, so this only gives 1 point

As you can see, the key to getting a good score in Tri Peaks Solitaire is to form as long a sequence as moves as you can.