Summit strategy

Summit rewards a very specific discipline: not playing cards you are allowed to play. Nearly every lost deal traces back to a card taken early because it was legal, which buried the route to a peak.

The stock is your budget, not your rescue

Every stock card you never turn is worth 25 points, and every stock draw resets your chain to zero. You have twenty-four of them and you will typically need eight to twelve. Treat them as currency. Before tapping the stock, check every uncovered card twice — the missed move is usually a King-to-Ace or Ace-to-King wrap, which the eye does not read as adjacent.

Dig toward the peaks, not along the base

The ten cards along the bottom row are free and always will be. They are not going anywhere, and clearing them earns you nothing structurally. The cards that matter are the ones covering other cards. Given a choice between two legal plays of equal rank, take the one higher up the pyramid — it uncovers new cards, and new cards are what keep a chain alive.

Base-row cards are best saved as chain connectors: the card you use to bridge from one peak to another without spending stock.

Summit rewards a very specific discipline: not playing cards you are allowed to play.

Read one move ahead, always; two when it is close

Before playing a card, look at what it uncovers and ask whether the new card continues the chain. A play that uncovers a dead end is often worse than drawing from the stock, because it spends a bridge you will need later. The habit worth building: when two cards of the same rank are both playable, take the one whose neighbours are more useful.

Clear the middle peak early

The centre peak's base cards are shared with both outer peaks in the row below, so clearing the middle opens the widest set of options. Deals that go wrong usually go wrong because both outer peaks are down and the middle is still standing with nothing to feed it.

Chains are worth more than the clock

The n-th card in a chain scores 50×n, so a chain of eight is worth 1,800 points on its own, while the time penalty is only two points per second. Spending twenty extra seconds to find a chain of six instead of two chains of three is worth roughly 400 points. Think first. The clock is the weakest term in the scoring formula and players consistently over-weight it.

When you are stuck, count what is left

If the stock is running low, stop optimising for score and start optimising for survival: count the ranks still on the board and check which of them your remaining stock can reach. Sometimes the correct play is to break a promising chain in order to take a card whose rank you will never see again.

Why the daily is never unfair

Every daily deal is solver-verified as clearable before publication, and unlimited deals are held to the same standard. So a lost deal is a routing error, and it is worth replaying: use the archive to take the same deal again knowing where the trap was. That is by far the fastest way to learn the shape of the mistakes, because the peaks layout repeats the same structural traps deal after deal.

Two thousand four hundred points is a strong day. A clean clear with six or more cards left in the stock puts you comfortably ahead of most people who played that deal.