Time
0:00
Best
—
A classic open solitaire in which every card is face up from the first move, so nothing is hidden and nothing is luck once the cards are dealt. Build the four suits from Ace to King by shifting single cards between eight rows, each one onto a card exactly one rank higher. Every deal is checked by a solver before you see it.
The four Aces start on the foundations at the top of the screen, and the other forty-eight cards are dealt face up into eight rows of six. Your goal is to build each foundation up in its own suit from the Ace to the King. When all fifty-two cards are home the deal is solved.
Only the last card of a row, the one on the right, can move, and only one card moves at a time. It can go onto its own foundation if it is the next card of that suit. It can go onto the end of another row if that row's last card is exactly one rank higher — a seven on an eight, a Jack on a Queen — and the suits do not matter. And it can go into a row that has been emptied, where any card may start a new row.
Tap a row to pick up its last card. The places it can legally go light up in green, and tapping one of them moves the card there. If there is only one legal place, the card goes there straight away with a single tap. Tap the same row again to put the card back down. Cards that can no longer be useful as a landing spot for anything else are moved to the foundations automatically, which saves a lot of tapping near the end.
You can undo as many moves as you like with the undo button, all the way back to the deal. Every deal has been solved by a computer before it is shown to you, so there is always a way through, even when you are stuck — undo further and try another line. The clock starts when the cards are dealt and your time to finish is your score, so lower is better.
Empty rows are the most powerful thing in the game, far more useful than any single card. With an empty row you can park any card at all, which lets you dig down to the low cards buried at the start of a row. Early on, look for the shortest row whose cards can all be sent elsewhere and clear it before you do anything else, and once you have an empty row, do not fill it with a card that has nowhere else to go unless that move uncovers something you need.
The low cards are what you are digging for. Twos and threes are usually buried near the start of their rows, and until they reach the foundations every card above them is stuck on the board. Before each move, ask which foundation is furthest behind and which cards are sitting on top of its next card. A move that shortens that row, even by one card, is almost always worth more than a move elsewhere that merely looks tidy.
Build runs in descending order, not in suit. Because a card can sit on any card one rank higher, a row running King, Queen, Jack down to a low card is a stable place to pile cards, and a King at the very start of a row never needs to move at all. Rows that start with a low card and have high cards on top are the problem rows; the aim of the middle game is to take them apart and rebuild the cards into long descending runs elsewhere.
Use undo as a tool rather than a confession. Because every card is visible there is no hidden information, only a long calculation, and trying a line for five or six moves then backing out is how strong players explore it. When you get completely stuck, undo back to the last point where you had an empty row, because that is where the real choice was made.