November 15, 2024
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Sophia is a software QA Tester and web developer with experience testing multiple survey and task apps. She has two years of...
Jessica is a writer for SideHustles.com. Her side hustles include freelance academic writing and editing, which she's done for...
Solitaire Cube is a gaming app you can use to play the traditional card game of solitaire and potentially win cash prizes of up to $200 (or possibly even more). The app is available for both iOS and Android devices.
According to the App Store’s blurbs on Solitaire Cube, it’s “so fun you’ll want to play for hours.” Our tester agrees that the app is fun, but can you really get paid for using it?
Solitaire Cube is a gaming app that was created by Tether Studios. It’s run by Skillz, which is a legitimate platform that hosts many other mobile games.
As you might expect from the name, this app is based on the classic card game of solitaire. It offers the option to play free games—which have prizes that are usually composed of in-app tokens—or games where you stake real cash for monetary prizes.
At the time of writing (August 2024), Solitaire Cube has a rating of 4.6 out of 5 in the App Store, based on 93,312 reviews. It has a rating of 4.5 in the Samsung Galaxy store, with 7,563 reviews.
Yes, Solitaire Cube pays real money. According to the app’s help pages, you can get paid in the form of checks, credit or debit card payments, or PayPal credit.
The method you’ll be paid by will depend on how much you win, how much you spend entering tournaments, and which payment method you use to fund your initial entry fees for those tournaments.
You can also use the Solitaire Cube app to get merchandise and gift cards, although these can take a long time to earn.
The Solitaire Cube app doesn’t pay very much. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ll lose more than you earn. Its payouts are real, but to get them, you actually have to win consistently, which is easier said than done.
We spent about 2¼ hours playing games in the app, and we invested $10 of our own money.
By the time we finished testing, we had a balance of $1.60. This means we lost $8.40, overall.
No, you don’t have to pay to play Solitaire Cube—technically.
You can limit yourself to playing practice games, which are free to enter. You can pay the entry fees with credits that you earn in the app (which can’t be purchased). These practice games don’t have cash prizes, so while you don’t have to spend money to play them, you can’t make money this way, either.
You may also be able to enter other Solitaire Cube games with cash prizes by earning in-app credits. When you complete tasks on Skillz apps, you’ll sometimes get a type of credit called Bonus Cash that you can use to enter tournaments. This makes it possible to compete for real cash without spending money.
However, in practice, it’s difficult to accumulate enough Bonus Cash to play without forking over money, and most players probably end up paying in the end. This means that Solitaire Cube is essentially a gambling app, although Skillz claims that it’s mainly skill-based rather than luck-based.
In Solitaire Cube, there are usually 2–4 players per tournament. Your goal is to beat the other players by getting a higher score than they do. All players have to solve the same deck, and your scores are based on how well you do in your respective games.
Most Solitaire Cube tournaments consist of just one game, but you may sometimes have to play multiple if you compete in bracket tournaments (which are tournaments with more than two players).
If you’ve ever played solitaire, you already know the basics of Solitaire Cube. When you start a game, you’ll see a deck of cards arranged similarly to the one in the screenshot below. The goal is to stack cards in separate suites in the piles labeled “A.”
You must stack the cards in ascending order according to their values. The value of most cards corresponds with the number on the card. Aces have a value of 1; Jacks, Queens, and Kings have values of 11, 12, and 13, respectively. In other words, you must make piles for each suite with aces at the bottom, followed by twos, threes, fours, et cetera.
To get all of the cards into these piles, you’ll need to turn over the cards from the top right pile, which is shown in the screenshot below, and move them around. In the version of solitaire featured in Solitaire Cube, you draw three cards at a time (whereas another popular version of solitaire allows you to draw just one card at a time). Initially, you can only move the top one.
You’ll also need to turn over and move the cards in the bottom seven stacks, but must move the cards at the top of these stacks beforehand.
You can move cards around the game by arranging them, as shown below, in the row containing seven stacks. The colors of these cards must alternate (i.e., red–black–red–black or black–red–black–red). Their values must also be sequentially descending, meaning you can place a Queen on a King, a Jack on a Queen, a 10 on a Jack, and so on.
To see the rules of Solitaire Cube, tap on the icon shown below, which you’ll see on the screen that appears when you open the app. Then, tap on “How to Play.”
Solitaire Cube has different types of tournaments with different types of entry fees. If you want to avoid spending money in the app, you can play practice games, which you can enter using in-app credits called “Zs” or “Z coins.”
There are also cash tournaments, which you have to enter with real cash or “Bonus Cash.” Bonus Cash is a type of credit you can use much like actual money. The main difference is that you can’t withdraw Bonus Cash from the app; you can only use it to pay entry fees.
In theory, you can also enter cash tournaments on Solitaire Cube by collecting yet another type of in-app credit called “Ticketz,” which you can exchange for Bonus Cash. However, it takes 20,000 Ticketz to get even $1 of Bonus Cash, so this strategy will require a lot of patience.
Solitaire Cube games have a time limit of 5 minutes. Your game may be shorter if you “solve the deck,” which means you’ve turned over all of the cards and can stack them in the top four piles.
To win money on Solitaire Cube, you have to enter cash tournaments and rank highly enough to get a prize.
As mentioned, you need to pay entry fees for cash tournaments, which you can do with either real money or Bonus Cash. In general, the larger the prizes a tournament offers are, the more you have to pay to enter.
We played four practice games on Solitaire Cube (plus two tutorial games that had no entry fees or prizes of either cash or credits). We ranked first three times, but we won only Zs for that, so it didn’t get us any closer to earning real money.
We also entered several cash tournaments and events in the app, for which we paid entry fees of $0–$3.
Here’s how we fared in these games:
Again, we spent about 2¼ hours in total using Solitaire Cube and trying to earn money (or credits to enter cash tournaments). We ultimately ended up with a balance of $1.60, meaning that we lost $8.40, all told.
As we’ve already mentioned, the only way to earn cash directly in Solitaire Cube is by entering cash tournaments. However, you can also complete other tasks to earn Ticketz (a type of in-app credit) and then swap these for Bonus Cash, which you can use to enter cash games.
This roundabout method of entering tournaments takes a long time, but it technically means you can make money with Solitaire Cube without risking any of your own hard-earned cash.
You can also exchange Ticketz for gift cards and merchandise. However, even the least valuable merchandise costs hundreds of thousands of Ticketz, so it’s hard to collect enough of these to exchange them for anything worthwhile.
The Daily Challenge is a task you can complete on Solitaire Cube each day to earn extra rewards like the ones shown below. The exact challenge you’ll have to complete and the prize on offer will depend on how many days you’ve used the app in a row.
As you can see from the screenshot below, many of the Daily Challenge tasks involve playing pro games, which is hard to do without spending money. This means that some tasks might be off-limits if you’re doing your best not to gamble real-world cash.
Other Daily Challenge tasks are free (although these will often only give you Zs as a reward).
We completed the Daily Challenge on two occasions. However, we only got Zs for doing so.
Solitaire Cube will give you a Login Bonus you can claim about twice a day. As the name suggests, you can do this when you log in.
Login bonuses may consist of Zs, Ticketz, Bonus Cash, or other rewards.
In addition to the Login Bonus, Solitaire Cube also sometimes gives away other free Zs in the “Store” tab (under the “Earn More Rewards” section). These credits aren’t really valuable, as you can only use them to enter practice games. However, there’s no reason not to claim them while you’re picking up your Login Bonus—it takes just a few extra clicks.
We claimed the Login Bonus on five occasions. We got Ticketz on two (20 and 92 Ticketz, respectively). On the other occasions, we only got Z coins.
Like other Skillz games, Solitaire Cube has a system that gives you extra rewards for progressing through its tiers from Bronze to Silver, Silver to Gold, and so on. The tier system is shown in the screenshot below:
You can graduate to the next tier by earning Ticketz. Doing this also gives you bonus Ticketz, which themselves count toward the next tier, and so on.
As mentioned, we spent about 2¼ hours on Solitaire Cube, but we didn’t manage to graduate to the Silver tier, so we didn’t get any rewards from this feature.
Solitaire Cube has leaderboards for the users that win the most medals in the app (medals are yet another reward you can earn when you play games).
This feature is locked until you’ve played five games. Once you’ve activated it, you can start earning prizes that include Zs, Ticketz, and Bonus Cash.
We checked the Solitaire Cube leaderboard on several occasions. However, the only prize we got from it was 100 Ticketz—not enough to negate the other losses we suffered while using the app.
Solitaire Cube sometimes gives you trophies for reaching in-app milestones like playing or winning a certain number of matches.
You can see the types of trophies available in the screenshot below.
Trophies come with prizes such as Zs, Ticketz, and Bonus Cash. We didn’t win any trophies that gave us cash prizes while we were using Solitaire Cube, but these may exist (although if they do, we’d guess that they’re quite rare and hard to obtain).
For many of the trophies on offer, you’ll have to play cash games to be eligible, and this is difficult (albeit not impossible) to do without spending your own money.
We checked for trophies twice while we were using Solitaire Cube, and although we appeared to be making progress toward prizes, we didn’t succeed in claiming anything after about 2¼ hours of testing.
Skillz runs sweepstakes for users of apps like Solitaire Cube. Sweepstakes offer prizes of Bonus Cash and possibly other types of rewards.
You can get entered into sweepstakes automatically when you deposit a certain amount of money in the Solitaire Cube app or when you enter certain games.
To view the sweepstake results and see if you’ve won, go to the app’s main menu, click on “FAQs,” then go to “Special Events.” This should take you to a list of the usernames of prize winners.
We asked Skillz for more information about their sweepstakes. They told us that we could find out about specific competitions in advance by going to Skillz News (which you can reach via the main menu).
Unfortunately, we didn’t win any prizes from Skillz sweepstakes while we were using Solitaire Cube (or, indeed, any of the other Skillz apps we tested beforehand).
Solitaire Cube sometimes shares promo codes that provide rewards (such as gift cards or free credits to use in the app) via its social media accounts or email.
We looked for promo codes several times on Skillz’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages, as well as in our email. We got lucky on one occasion, when we found the special offer shown in the screenshot below.
You can get Bonus Cash by referring friends to use Solitaire Cube (or other Skillz apps). You’ll get $1 if a friend uses your referral code when making their first Skillz deposit; they’ll also get $1.
However, the app doesn’t specify whether you can use your code an unlimited number of times or if it will only work for a set number of people.
We didn’t refer any friends to use Solitaire Cube, so we didn’t get any rewards from this feature.
To get Solitaire Cube, you can visit the Skillz page for the game and scan the QR code to download the app onto your mobile device.
Alternatively, if you have an iOS (Apple) or Samsung Galaxy device, you can use the buttons below to download the app directly from the App Store or the Samsung Galaxy store.
We don’t recommend making monetary deposits on Solitaire Cube. It’s best to play the game without risking real money.
However, if you decide to do this, you have are several payment options:
There are several denominations in which you can pay deposits to fund Solitaire Cube entry fees, starting from $5.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the app incentivizes you to put down bigger payments by offering you Bonus Cash freebies if you pay out more. However, we recommend resisting the temptation to do this, as there’s a good chance you’ll end up losing more money that way.
When we’ve tested Skillz apps in the past, we had an easy time withdrawing money from them, and when we withdrew, we received our money the next day. It’s generally easy to cash out from these apps—provided you’ve actually won anything.
According to the Solitaire Cube FAQ pages, withdrawals can take 4–6 weeks to process. However, as we’ve mentioned, our withdrawals have never taken anything like this long. When we cashed out from Solitaire Cube, we received our money the very next day.
Yes, there are sometimes fees when you withdraw money from Solitaire Cube. You’ll pay a $1.50 fee for any withdrawals under $10. This means it’s not really worthwhile to withdraw a small amount of money from the app, as you’ll lose at least 15% of it to fees.
Oddly, it seems you can bypass this fee by depositing money in the app and then immediately withdrawing it again, along with whatever preexisting amount was on your balance. We used this strategy to withdraw $1.60 by adding $15 to our account and then withdrawing $16.60, and we got away with paying no fees by doing this.
The only potential downside of using this sneaky strategy is that you could lose any Bonus Cash you’ve accumulated, as we’ll explain later.
Solitaire Cube doesn’t specifically mention a minimum threshold you must reach to withdraw money from the app.
In theory, as there’s a $1.50 fee for smaller withdrawals, you’ll need at least a balance of at least $1.51 to withdraw anything from Solitaire Cube (less than that and you’ll lose your entire payout to fees).
In practice, as we’ve explained, you can add a deposit in the app of at least $15 and then immediately withdraw it to avoid paying anything.
Yes, one point to bear in mind regarding withdrawals on Solitaire Cube (and other Skillz gaming apps) is that you’ll lose any Bonus Cash you’ve accumulated whenever you make a withdrawal. This feature is very common on gaming apps like this, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.
You also can’t spend your Bonus Cash without also spending your withdrawable cash, as Skillz automatically takes most of your entry fees from your withdrawable cash rather than from your Bonus Cash when you enter games.
One takeaway from this is that you shouldn’t ever use Ticketz to buy Bonus Cash before making a withdrawal. Instead, wait until after you withdraw, since withdrawing won’t affect your Ticketz balance like it will affect your Bonus Cash.
Anyone can play Solitaire Cube. However, not everyone can take part in cash games, as the app is banned in certain states: 1
You also have to be at least 18 years old to play cash games on Skillz’s gaming apps.
There are several alternatives to Solitaire Cube that you can consider if you like the idea of playing games for money but aren’t sure that this app is for you:
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