Aces Up
Aces Up is a quick and simple, one-pack, patience or solitaire card game. One advantage of Aces Up is its minimal use of space: it requires only four piles of cards, and a place to discard cards to. Winning chances with good play are about 1 in 10 games. Names. Aces Up is also known as Aces High, Idiot's Delight, Firing-Squad and Drivel or Drivel Patience. It shares the name Idiot's Delight with two other unrelated solitaire games, Perpetual Motion and King Albert. It shares the name Aces Up with Easthaven, which is a  variation of Klondike and is also unrelated. History. The rules are first recorded in England as Drivel Patience by Mary Whitmore Jones in 1900 who acknowledges that "this is not a complimentary name... but it is the one by which it is generally known, and to those accustomed to play games required care and consideration it seems appropriate enough to this one, which stands in need of neither." In 1940, Wood & Goddard describe it under the name of Firing Squad, but most later authors call it Aces Up, while sometimes acknowledging its earlier names. Spadaccini (2005) is an exception, calling  the game Idiot's Delight and giving alternative names as Aces Up and Aces High. Rules. Gameplay for Aces Up works as follows: When the game ends, the number of discarded cards is your score. The maximum score (and thus the score necessary to win) is 48, which means all cards have been discarded except for the four aces, thus the name of the game. Variations. A much more challenging variation on Aces Up allows only the aces to be moved onto an empty pile. This makes game play much more restrictive and consequently the game can only be completed  roughly once in every 270 games.