Card Games For Dummies. Barry Rigal

the player loses patience and punches the spectator in the shoulder.

      The object of Klondike is to build up piles of the four suits from the ace (the lowest card) to the king on the foundation. You don’t start with any cards in the foundation; you collect cards for it during the course of play.

      To build the initial layout, or tableau, you deal seven piles, with one card in the first pile, two in the second pile, three in the third, and so on. Turn over the top card of each pile as you deal out the cards.

When dealing out the piles, place seven cards face-down to form the seven piles; deal the next six cards to form the second layer of each row (except the row on the far left), and then the next five cards to form the third layer, and so on. If you lay out the cards in this way, you avoid any problems caused by imperfect shuffling.

      You build on the top cards of each pile by putting the next-lower numbered cards of the opposite color on the top cards. Your building cards come from the stock.

      To start the game, you play the cards in the stock, which should consist of 24 cards. Go through the stock three cards at a time, putting the cards into a waste pile, while preserving the order of the cards in that pile. You have access to only the top card of each set of three. If you use that top card, you gain access to the card below it, and so on. When you finish going through the stock, gather it up and go through it again.

      You may go through the stock only three times. If you can’t persuade the Solitaire to work out after the three turns, you lose the game. However, most people that I know ignore the three-times rule and continue with the Solitaire until it works out, which it does a fair percentage of the time.

      

As an alternative, you can go through the stock one card at a time and only one time. I haven’t concluded whether you’re more likely to get the Solitaire to work out with this rule or not, but instinctively, I feel that it must help. Some people go through the deck one card at a time on three separate occasions before calling the whole thing off.

      You can move the turned-up cards around (leaving the face-down cards in place), and whenever you move all the face-up cards from one pile of the tableau, you turn over the new top card.

      When you use all the cards in a pile, you create a space. You can move any king, or pile headed by a king — but only one headed by a king — into the space, and then you turn another face-down card over on the pile from which you moved the king pile.

      Whenever you turn up an ace in the tableau (or in the stock), move that card to the foundation and start a new foundation pile. You may then take any top card from the tableau and move it onto the foundation, where appropriate. For example, after you put the ♦A in the foundation, you can take the ♦2 when it becomes available to start building up the diamonds.

Living La Belle Lucie

      As far as I’m concerned, La Belle Lucie (which is also known as Midnight Oil, Clover Leaf, the Fan, or Alexander the Great) is the best Solitaire that I’ve played. Every move is critical. The game requires great planning and forethought and rewards the player with a healthy chance of success.

      I’ve been known to take more than 10 minutes to make a move while I plan the intricacies of competing strategies. It’s certainly not unusual for players to take a few minutes at a time to plan a move.

      The objective of La Belle Lucie is to build up all four suits from a foundation of the ace through to the king.

      Getting started

      You start by dealing all the cards face-up in piles of threes, making sure that each card in every trio is visible (you fan each trio so that you can see a top, middle, and bottom card, hence its alias, Fan). The last four cards go in two piles of two. Your aim is to move cards around the tableau to free up cards that can build up the foundation.

      Whenever you expose an ace on the top of a pile, you move it to start a foundation pile, and can start building the suit up from there. The next card to go on the ace is the 2 of that suit, and you keep going up to the king of the suit. If you don’t expose an ace, you have to uncover one by moving the cards around.

      You get three tries (or cycles) to move all the cards into suits. At the end of each cycle, you pick up all the cards off the foundations, shuffle them well, and distribute them in trios again.

      Making your moves

      You can move cards in the tableau onto the card of the same suit one higher in rank, but beware! You can move each card only once, and you can only move one card at a time, which is critical. For example, as soon as the ♦7 goes on the ♦8, you can’t move the ♦8 again unless both cards go onto the foundation in the diamond suit. You can’t move the ♦7 and ♦8 onto the ♦9 because of the one-card-at-a-time rule. You have thus “buried” the ♦8. You can’t move this card until the next redeal, unless the ♦A through the ♦6 go into the foundation, whereupon the ♦7 and ♦8 can also go onto the foundation.

However, this rule doesn’t matter if the ♦8 is at the bottom of a pile; no cards are trapped by the move. The rule does matter if the ♦8 covers something else. Note that kings never move; therefore, you want them at the bottom of piles.

      

Bear in mind that the purpose of the game is to build up all the suits in order, starting with the ace, so you try to get the aces out from their piles. If the aces are at the top of their piles already, so much the better. If not, you have to excavate them, but at the same time, you have to plan the sequence of moves that brings the cards to the top. It isn’t a good idea to play five moves to get out the ♦A and then discover that the ♦2 got permanently buried in the process. Of course, sometimes burying a card may prove inevitable. The skill of the game is to bury as few cards as possible by making your moves in the right order, and to bury only cards that seem less relevant at the moment, such as jacks and queens. Kings automatically trap everything below them, so if you’re worried about burying the ♦J by putting the ♦10 on it, and the ♦Q is below the ♥K, relax! You cost yourself nothing — you were never going to get to move the ♦J anyway.

      Another example of a potentially bad holding is seeing something along the lines of the ♦Q ♦10. Even if you get to put the ♦10 on the jack, doing so freezes the jack. You can’t move the ♦J again, because you can’t move the ♦10 and the ♦J onto the ♦Q.

Sometimes you get mutually impossible moves, as shown in Figure 2-7. With the base shown, you can’t move the ♦6 until you clear the ♥2, and you can’t move the ♥2 until you free the ♦6 to get at the ♥3. Neither card moves until the ♥A is free, when the ♥2 can go to the foundation.

      FIGURE 2-7: Only one series of moves can get you out of this mess.

      Certain moves are risk-free at the start of the game:

       You can always move any queen onto the king of the same suit (because kings are stuck anyway).

       After you move the top two cards of a pile of three and expose the card at the bottom of a pile, you can put the relevant card on top of it without worrying about the consequences. (When a card is at the bottom of a pile, it stands to reason that you can’t trap anything underneath it if you should render it unable to move.)

       Whenever a card is stuck (for example, if you put the ♦7 on the ♦8, you make both