Heart to Heart strategy

Open up the heart from the tip

At the start, only one card is playable: the tip. Until it has a partner, there is nothing else to do but turn over cards from the stock until you find one of the same rank. Then each card removed from the bottom frees others above it: the heart opens from bottom to top, and cards along the edges, covered by just one card, become free first.

Favor pairs within the heart

A pair of two cards from the heart removes two at once and can free up to four cards; a pair using the waste removes only one from the heart. This does not affect the final score (250 for every won game), but it does affect the number of moves. When two free cards have the same rank, removing them together is rarely a mistake.

Count the copies

There are 4 copies of each rank, and all the cards in the heart are visible. Before using a copy from the stock to match a free card, check where the others are: if two copies are buried in the heart, one covering the other, they can only be removed with help from the stock. The extreme case is deal HH1-N-AAAAAAC on the Examples page: the tip is a King, and the other three Kings are in the heart, behind it.

Go through the stock

The stock can be recycled without limit: turning over a card costs only a move, never the game. In the winning game on the Examples page, the first pair does not come until move 10, and the stock is gone through 3 times. After 30 moves, 21 cards remain in the heart: most of the work happens near the end, when many cards are free at the same time.

Undo to experiment

Undo restores the cards and deducts the points from the undone pair; it also reverses card draws. It lets you try an order of pairs, see which cards become free, then go back.