Score
0
Best
—
The classic fan solitaire. All 52 cards lie face up in eighteen little fans; move the top cards onto the same suit one higher and send every suit home from Ace to King, with two redeals and one Merci to rescue a stuck game.
Tap a fan to move its top card onto the one place it can go: the top of another fan that holds the same suit, one rank higher. A card that can move right now has a green border. Cards that can go to the foundations go there by themselves, and your score is how many of the 52 cards are home.
At the start the deck is shuffled and spread into eighteen fans of three cards, with one card left over as a fan of its own. Every card is face up, so you can plan ahead. Above the fans are four foundations, one per suit, each built up from Ace to King. Only the top card of a fan can ever move, and only one card at a time.
A card may go onto another fan only when that fan's top card is the same suit and exactly one higher — the 6♥ goes on the 7♥ and nowhere else. Because each card exists only once, a top card always has at most one place to go, so a single tap is enough. Kings can never move onto a fan; they only leave by going home. An emptied fan stays empty for the rest of the deal.
When no move is left, press Redeal. All the cards still in the fans are gathered, shuffled and spread again in threes. You get two redeals. After the second, the Merci button appears: press it, then tap any card buried inside a fan to pull it out onto the top of that fan. You get one Merci per game. Undo takes back moves within the current deal, but not a redeal or a Merci.
The game ends when every card is home or nothing at all can be done. If you finish all 52, each redeal you did not use adds 10 points and an unused Merci adds 5, so the best possible score is 77. Save a good score to the Hall of Fame from the result card.
Before your first move, look for Kings sitting on top of lower cards of their own suit. That is the classic killer: a King can never move onto another fan, it can only go home, and the K♠ cannot go home until every lower spade is home — including the one trapped under it. The same trap, a little milder, appears whenever a card covers a lower card of its suit: it can only escape onto the next higher card of that suit, so if that card is stuck too, the whole knot is frozen. Spot these knots early; they are what your redeals and your Merci are for.
Order matters even though every move is forced. When two moves are available, make the one that uncovers a card you need next, or the one that lets a whole chain fall home. Building runs pays off: a fan that ends in 7♠ 6♠ 5♠ goes home in one sweep the moment the 4♠ arrives. Emptying a fan is not a gain by itself, because an empty fan can never be refilled; it simply removes one place to build on.
Do not rush to redeal. Every move you can still make before redealing puts cards on the foundations or tidies them into longer same-suit runs, and those runs get broken up again by the shuffle, so take everything the current layout offers first, then redeal. Use Undo freely within a deal to test a line and come back if it leads nowhere.
Save the Merci for the end. After the last redeal, look for the single buried card whose release would let the most cards go home — usually the next card a foundation is waiting for, sitting under higher cards of its own suit. La Belle Lucie is an old French patience, also known as Midnight Oil and Alexander the Great. Even good players only finish some of their games; in our simulations a careful strategy cleared about one deal in eight, so a full 52 with a redeal or the Merci still in hand is a real achievement.