Agnes Solitaire

Seven depots, no draw

How to play Agnes Solitaire

Twenty-eight cards go out as the familiar seven-column staircase, every card face up. The next card off the deck is the starter: it opens the first foundation and fixes the base rank for all four. Seven more cards form the reserve depots, and the last sixteen wait to be dealt on to those depots a row at a time.

Columns build down by alternating colour and properly alternating runs move as a unit, which is Klondike behaviour. The foundations are not: they climb in suit from the base rank and wrap past the king back through the ace, finishing on the rank just below where they started.

There is no stock to draw from and no waste pile. The only fresh cards you will ever see arrive when you deal a row on to the depots — and that is a one-way action.

Spaces take one rank

Which moves the space rule blocks

Digging carefully

Agnes Solitaire strategy

Note the base rank and the space rank before your first move. The game tells you both. Every plan you make depends on them, and the instinct to hunt for aces will actively mislead you.

Keep the depots shallow. A depot showing a useful card is worth more than a tidy tableau, and every card you clear off one is a card the next deal cannot bury.

Be slow to empty a column. A space you cannot fill is worse than a column with two cards in it, because it does nothing at all until one of four specific cards surfaces.

Move sequences to uncover, not to arrange. With no stock and only sixteen buried cards, the cards that decide the game are the ones already on the table under something else.

Why deals end early

Why Agnes deals end early

Dealing a reserve row to see something new

Sixteen stock cards make only two and a bit rows, and each one lands directly on top of the seven depot cards you already have. If a depot is showing a card you will want in three moves, dealing buries it for good. Exhaust the moves you can see before dealing, every time.

Emptying a column without the space card in hand

In Klondike a space is worth having because any king can fill it. Here only one rank will do — the one below the base — and there are four of them in the deck. Clearing a column when all four are buried creates a hole you cannot use and cannot undo.

Reading the foundations as ace-to-king

The base rank is dealt, so a foundation that starts at the eight runs 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A, 2 and finishes on the seven. Players habitually hunt for aces early and hold the wrong cards. Check the base rank before planning anything.

Worth the attempt?

Is Agnes Solitaire winnable?

Less often than Klondike, and the reasons are structural rather than bad luck. Sixteen stock cards is very little material, the reserve deal cannot be undone, and the single-rank space rule turns the most useful resource in Klondike into something you often cannot use at all.

Everything is face up from the start, so the losses are legible — you can usually see which deal buried the card that mattered. We do not publish a win rate: versions of Agnes differ on whether the tableau packs by colour or by suit, and this one packs by alternating colour.

Borrowed from both

Agnes between Klondike and Canfield

Agnes borrows its tableau from one game and its foundations from another, which is what makes it awkward to place — and awkward to play if you arrive expecting either.

The space rule is where Agnes is hardest. Klondike gives you four kings, Canfield refills a space from the reserve automatically, and Duchess works down a priority list. Agnes alone can hand you a space that stays useless for the rest of the deal.