Piles
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Best
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Fifty-two cards in one line. Drop a pile one or three places to its left when the top cards share a suit or a rank, and squeeze the line down to as few piles as you can.
Fifty-two cards are laid out in a single long line, read left to right and wrapping down the screen. A pile may be moved onto the pile immediately to its left, or onto the pile three places to its left, and only if the two top cards share a suit or share a rank.
When a pile moves, the gap it leaves closes up. That is the whole difficulty: every move shortens the line by one and reshuffles who is next to whom, so a move that looks free can destroy a pair that was about to work three places away.
Piles you are allowed to move are outlined. Tap one and it goes, unless it has two possible landing places, in which case you tap the one you want. The number in the corner of a pile is how many cards are stacked in it, and only the top card ever matters.
The deal ends when nothing can move any more, and the piles you have left are your score for that deal. Three deals make a round and your score is the total, so lower is better. Reducing a deal to a single pile is the traditional goal and it is genuinely rare, so do not expect it; play for three or four and you are doing well.
The three-place move is the one that wins deals, and the one-place move is the one that loses them. Every move you make deletes a position from the line, and a move to the left neighbour deletes a position that was sitting between two cards which might have wanted each other. Before you take an easy adjacent merge, look at what is three to the right of it and ask whether you are about to break that link forever.
Work on the left end of the line whenever you have a choice. Merging near the front compacts the part of the line that everything else will eventually have to travel through, and it leaves the long unexplored tail intact for later. Players who clear the right end first almost always end up with a bloated, unmovable left half and a score in double figures.
Tops are the only thing that matters, so a tall pile is not a commitment — it is a chameleon. A pile whose top is the seven of hearts behaves exactly like a lone seven of hearts, no matter how many cards are buried in it. That means you can deliberately drop a card you do not need onto a pile to change what that position is, which is the single most useful idea in the game and the one beginners never think of.
When two moves both look fine, prefer the one that leaves more moves available afterwards. Counting them takes a second and it is worth it: a simple policy of always choosing the move that maximises the number of moves on the next turn cuts the average end-of-deal pile count from about nine down to about four and a half. That is a bigger swing than any amount of clever pattern spotting.
Finally, accept that some deals are just bad. The score is the total across three deals, so a hopeless one is not worth agonising over — take the quick reasonable merges, finish it, and save your concentration for the next one where the suits happen to line up.