Peaks solitaire strategy: build long streaks and win more deals

The rules in one minute

Cards sit on the table in a shape, overlapping in rows. A card is open once the cards covering it are gone. You play open cards onto a single waste pile, and each one has to be exactly one rank higher or lower than the card on top. Suits don't matter, and Kings and Aces wrap around, so a King goes on an Ace and an Ace on a King. When nothing fits, you turn a card from the stock. Clear the whole table to win.

In Star Solitaire every card you play from the table in a row scores 10 times your current streak, so the tenth card in a streak is worth 100 on its own. Every fourth card in a row earns a wild Comet you can hold for later, up to two at a time. Drawing from the stock ends the streak. Using a Comet doesn't.

How we tested it

We took 600 real deals from the game's own deal maker and played every one of them several times, each time with a different habit, so luck was the same for every habit. Same tables, same stock, same Comet buried in the pile. Then we counted wins, scores and the longest streak in each game. The numbers below come from those runs.

The gap is huge. Same deals, and the habit of tracing the chain before you tap wins nearly three times as often as grabbing the first match and more than doubles the score.

Trace the chain before you tap

When a 6 and an 8 both fit on your 7, don't pick by feel. Follow each one. If you play the 6, what goes on it? A 5 or a 7. Is one open? And then what? Count how far each path runs using only the cards you can see. Take the longer one.

It sounds slow, but on a table of 25 to 28 cards you rarely have more than four or five open cards, so it's a few seconds of looking. And it compounds: a longer chain flips more face-down cards, which gives the next chain more to work with. That's why looking even two cards ahead won 67% of deals while playing the first card that fit won 27%.

When two paths tie, dig

If both choices give the same chain, take the card that's covering something. Only playing cards that uncover others, with no looking ahead at all, still won 60% of our deals, more than double the first-card habit. A freshly flipped card is one more option for every streak after it.

Don't overthink it, though. Once you're already tracing chains, the uncovering rule is only a tie breaker. Putting it first made our results slightly worse (71% wins against 74%), because it sometimes cut a long streak short to flip a card early.

Spend your Comets on streaks

This is the one that surprised us. We tried saving Comets until the stock was empty, as an emergency card for the very end. It won about as often (69% against 71%), but the average score fell from 1,536 to 1,024 and the longest streak per deal dropped from 10.8 to 5.7.

Here's why. A Comet used mid-streak keeps the streak alive, so the next card is worth 10 times a big number instead of 10. A Comet still in your pocket is only worth 100 in the bonus if you clear the table, and while you hold two, any fourth card in a row that would have earned a third is simply lost. Our hoarding runs lost about one Comet every three deals that way. So when you're stuck in the middle of a streak, play the Comet. When you're stuck right after a draw, with a streak of zero, a draw costs you almost nothing.

Don't forget the wraparound

King to Ace and Ace to King are legal, and in our runs they came up close to twice a deal. They're the easiest plays to miss because they don't look like neighbors. A run like Q, K, A, 2 is often the bridge from one side of the table to the other, so when you're tracing chains, read past the King.

A quick checklist

• Before every tap, follow each possible card a few steps and take the longest chain.
• On a tie, play the card that uncovers something.
• Stuck mid-streak with a Comet? Use it. Stuck at zero? Draw.
• Never sit on two Comets when the next fourth card is coming. Spend one first.
• Read the wraparound: K and A are neighbors.
• Clear the table and every card left in the stock is worth 25, so clean streaks pay twice.

Every Star Solitaire deal is one we've checked can be cleared, so a loss always had a way through. For the rest of the rules, the Sky Map and the card backs, see the full Star Solitaire guide, and for the bigger family of card games, our solitaire games page.

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