Super Ace
A tidy, quiet card-clearing puzzle that spends its first hour looking simpler than it is. I nearly gave up on day two. By day six I was working out board layouts on the back of a receipt, which is usually a sign that a puzzle game has got me.
Verdict. Slow to reveal itself and badly served by its own opening levels, but the chain system underneath is one of the better casual puzzle ideas I have played this year.
Scorecard
Clean, accurate taps and a smart hit-area bias towards legal cards. Marked down because the upper tiers get visually cramped on a small screen and there is no zoom.
The rules are learnable in a minute, but the opening boards are so easy that they teach the wrong lesson, and the game hides its best feature in a settings menu.
Individual boards are the perfect length and can be paused mid-move without losing anything. The five-pack grouping and the soft attempt timer cost it the last two points.
Chain scoring gives every cleared board a second, harder version of itself. I went back to boards I had already finished, which almost never happens in this genre.
Adverts are confined to pack transitions, which is polite. The optional advert that refills an attempt is offered a little too eagerly at exactly the moment you are most annoyed.
- Genre
- Card-clearing puzzle, single-player, level-based with a score chase
- Session length
- 2 to 6 minutes per board; a level pack runs about 20 minutes
- Controls
- Single tap to play a card, tap the reserve pile to turn one over, long press to preview a card's connections
- Played on
- 3 GB budget handset and a mid-range 2025 phone
- Cost
- Free to play; short adverts between level packs, plus optional cosmetic card backs
What you actually do
Each board is a fan of face-up cards, stacked in overlapping tiers so that only the cards on the outer edge are playable. At the bottom sits a single active card. You may play any exposed card whose rank sits one step above or one step below the active card — a seven takes a six or an eight, and so on. The played card becomes the new active card, and the process repeats. Clear the fan and the board is done.
The wrinkle, and the reason for the name, is the ace. An ace connects in both directions and to both ends of the sequence, so it can follow a king or a two, and anything can follow it. It is the pivot that lets a stalled chain restart. There are usually three or four on a board and how you spend them is essentially the entire strategy.
Scoring runs on chain length. Each card played without reaching for the reserve pile extends the current chain by one, and what a card is worth scales with the chain rather than with the card. Twenty-eight cards taken in one continuous sweep are worth several times the same twenty-eight taken in four sweeps of seven. Breaking a chain costs nothing but points, which stacks two separate difficulties on top of one another: finishing the board at all, and finishing it neatly. I warmed to that far more than I expected to.
How it feels in the hand
Calm. Cards slide rather than snap, the sound is a soft paper click, and there is a small satisfying pause when a long chain resolves. Taps land accurately even on the crowded upper tiers because the game biases the hit area towards whichever card is legally playable — a small, invisible kindness that I only noticed when I tried to deliberately tap a buried card and could not.
The long-press preview is the feature that turned the game for me. Hold any exposed card and the game dims everything except the cards that would become playable if you took it. It is effectively a one-move lookahead, it costs nothing, and it is buried in a settings menu as an option that is off by default. Turn it on immediately.
The first twenty boards teach you to clear. The next twenty teach you that clearing was never the point.
Session shape
Boards are short and levels are grouped into packs of five, which is a slightly awkward unit — a pack is about twenty minutes and quitting mid-pack forfeits the completion mark for the set. I would have preferred each board to stand alone. In practice I played two or three boards at a time and simply let the set mark go, which the game allowed without complaint.
There is an energy system, and I want to be precise about it because it is the sort of thing that gets exaggerated. You have five attempts on a timer. A cleared board costs nothing. Only a failed board consumes one, and a failure takes several minutes to reach, so across sixteen days I hit the limit exactly twice, both times on the same stubborn board on day eleven. It is a soft brake rather than a wall. It is still a brake, and Session Shape is scored accordingly.
Where the difficulty comes from
Board geometry, not the draw. The later layouts stack cards so that whole wings of the fan are locked behind a single card, and if you spend the ace that unlocks the left wing on a greedy chain extension on the right, the board is not lost but the chain certainly is. The reserve pile is finite and generous, which is the correct choice — the game wants you thinking about order, not about luck.
The one design choice I disliked is that the level select screen shows a three-star rating without telling you the score thresholds until after your first attempt. I replayed several boards for a star I could have earned first time if I had known what the target was.
Five pointers
- Turn on the connection preview before your first board. It is in settings, it is off by default, and it is the difference between guessing and playing.
- Never spend an ace to extend a chain by one. Aces are keys. Use them to open a wing of the board you cannot otherwise reach, and take the broken chain in the meantime.
- Clear the tallest stack first. The tiers that hide the most cards are the ones that strand you at the end. A board that looks nearly finished but has one deep column left is a board about to stall.
- Count before you tap on the ladder boards. On layouts where several cards share a rank, work out which one leaves the better follow-up. The game gives you unlimited time and no penalty for thinking.
- Take the failure. If a chain is dead, do not burn reserve cards hunting for a rescue. Restart the board with what you learned; boards are short and the layout does not change.
Who it is for
People who like solitaire-shaped puzzles and want one with an actual skill expression on top. If you bounce off games that do not explain their depth up front, you may need to trust this entry for the first hour. If you want something instant, entry 41 on Chicken Game is the better fit.
This is an informational diary entry about a free casual video game. Super Ace, as described above, is a single-player card puzzle played for its own sake: no cash enters or leaves it, its points are in-game points and nothing further, and none of the writing above is a promotion. Thumbstick Diary holds no arrangement of any kind with the game’s publisher, and the title appears only to say which game is under discussion.