TriPeaks Solitaire clears three overlapping peaks one rank at a time, chaining long runs up and down from a single waste pile. Play TriPeaks Solitaire free in your browser — no download, no account.
How You WinClear all twenty-eight tableau cards before the stock runs out. Longer unbroken chains score more, so how you clear matters as well as whether you clear.
- Layout
- Three peaks · 28 tableau cards · 23 in stock
- Setting
- Ace wraps to king, or ranks form a line
- Scoring
- Chain length: first card 1 point, second 2, third 3…
TriPeaks Setup: Three Peaks, a Stock and One Waste Pile
- Tableau: twenty-eight cards in three peaks of one, two and three cards, all resting on a shared bottom row of ten face-up cards. Only that bottom row is exposed at the start.
- Stock: the remaining twenty-three cards, face down. Turning one moves it to the waste and ends whatever chain you were on.
- Waste: the single pile you play onto. Its top card is the only thing that decides what you may take next.
- There are no foundations. You win by emptying the three peaks, not by collecting suits — leftover stock cards do not matter.
Complete Rules
- Twenty-eight cards form three peaks of one, two and three cards, joined by a bottom row of ten. One card starts the waste and the remaining twenty-three form the stock.
- A tableau card is uncovered when both cards resting on it have gone. The bottom row is uncovered from the start.
- An uncovered card can be taken when its rank is exactly one above or one below the top of the waste. Suit never matters.
- The card you take becomes the new top of the waste, so chains continue from wherever you just landed.
- With wrapping on, ace and king count as adjacent. With it off, nothing plays onto an ace except a two, and nothing plays onto a king except a queen.
- Turning the stock moves one card to the waste and breaks the current chain. There are no redeals.
- Each card in a chain scores its position in that chain: one, then two, then three, and so on until the chain breaks.
- The deal is won when all twenty-eight tableau cards are gone, and lost when the stock is empty and no card can be taken.
TriPeaks Variants: Do Aces Wrap Around to Kings?
- Aces wrap treats the ranks as a loop, so an ace can follow a king and a king can follow an ace. This is the more common setting and the one most implementations use silently.
- No wrap treats the ranks as a line: nothing plays onto an ace except a two, and nothing onto a king except a queen. Aces and kings become dead ends rather than connectors.
- The gap is much larger than it sounds. Our exact solver finds about 97% of deals winnable with wrapping on and about 74% with it off — more than twenty points from one footnote.
- Each setting has its own verified deal library, because a deal number is a different problem under each. Most published TriPeaks win rates never say which one they measured.
Your First Game
- Open the peaks from the bottom row up. Each peak needs both cards below its tip removed, and a tip left standing at the end is the usual way a deal is lost.
- Before turning the stock, check every uncovered card once more. A turn always breaks the chain, and often the card you need was already available.
- Spread your work across all three peaks rather than finishing one. Peaks that are only half opened at the end are worth nothing.
- Watch for cards that sit under two different peaks in the bottom row. Removing those opens the most at once.
- With wrapping on, remember that aces and kings are both connectors. With it off they are dead ends, and holding one under a peak is a real problem.
Practical Strategy
- Chase chain length, not the easy card. Since a chain scores one, two, three and so on, taking a six-card run is worth twenty-one points against six for the same cards taken separately.
- Look one rank ahead in both directions before every removal. Choosing between two legal cards is really choosing which continuations you keep.
- Keep a spare card of a common rank uncovered. It is your reconnection point when a chain would otherwise end and force a stock turn.
- Count the stock. With twenty-three turns and twenty-eight cards to clear, at least some of your clearing must come from chains, not from turns.
- The three tips are the hardest cards. Plan the endgame around which tip you will clear last, and make sure its rank is one you can still reach.
Winning and Special Rules
- The wrap setting is part of the deal's identity, not a preference laid over one game. Each setting has its own verified library because a deal number means a different problem under each.
- Our solver decides TriPeaks deals exactly rather than approximately. The state is small enough to search completely, partly because two cards of the same rank are interchangeable here — suits never matter — which cuts the state space by a factor of four.
- That exactness gives numbers nobody else publishes with confidence. Public win rates for TriPeaks are mostly recycled from unsourced pages that contradict each other.
- Scoring counts chain position rather than card value, which is the convention most modern implementations use. Turning a card from the stock always resets the streak to zero.
- There is no redeal, so unlike Klondike or Pyramid there is no pass-count setting to argue about.
Common Mistakes
- Turning the stock as a reflex. Every turn ends a chain and spends one of only twenty-three, and the card you wanted is frequently already on the table.
- Clearing one peak completely while the other two stay closed. The deal is won on all twenty-eight cards, not on the tidiest peak.
- Ignoring the score while clearing. Two players can both clear the same deal with a threefold difference in score purely from chain discipline.
- Assuming aces and kings connect. That is true only with wrapping on, and it is the first thing to check when a chain refuses to continue.
- Comparing win rates across sites. Most published TriPeaks figures do not say whether wrapping was on, which alone accounts for a twenty-point difference.
How Difficult Is TriPeaks Solitaire?
TriPeaks is the most winnable of the six games here, and the wrap setting is the whole story. Our exact solver finds about 97% of deals winnable with wrapping on, and about 74% with it off. Both figures are exact: the solver never returns an unknown.
That gap of more than twenty points is larger than most players expect from what sounds like a footnote. Allowing ace to follow king turns the ranks from a line into a loop, and a loop has no dead ends.
Because almost every wrapped deal is winnable, difficulty moves from whether you clear to how well you clear. Chain scoring is the real game: the same twenty-eight cards can be worth roughly six times as much depending on how you order them.
Trustworthy public numbers for TriPeaks essentially do not exist — most of what is published traces back to unsourced pages that disagree with each other. The figures on this page come from our own exhaustive search over a hundred thousand deals, which is why we state them without hedging.
TriPeaks Solitaire FAQ
How does a card become playable?
It must be uncovered — nothing resting on it — and one rank above or below the top of the waste. Suits are irrelevant.
What does the wrap setting do?
With wrapping on, ace connects to king as well as to two, so the ranks form a loop. With it off, ace and king are ends of a line. It is the single largest rule difference between TriPeaks implementations, and it changes the solvable rate by more than twenty points.
How is the score calculated here?
The first card of a chain scores one, the second two, the third three, and so on. Turning a card from the stock breaks the chain and resets the count, so a run of six is worth far more than six separate cards.
Can I turn the stock again after it is empty?
No. TriPeaks has twenty-three stock cards and no redeals, so every turn is a permanent decision.
What is the history of TriPeaks?
TriPeaks is unusually recent and unusually well attributed: Robert Hogue designed it in 1989, and it reached players through Microsoft Entertainment Pack. It is also known as Three Peaks, Triple Peaks and Tri Towers, and it belongs to the same adjacent-rank family as Golf Solitaire — the peaks layout and the chain scoring are what set it apart.
Are TriPeaks deals verified solvable?
Yes, under whichever wrap setting you chose. Our solver decides TriPeaks deals exactly — it never returns an unknown — so the libraries behind both settings are complete rather than approximate.