Australian Patience

Twenty-eight face up

How to play Australian Patience

Seven columns of four are dealt face up, so more than half the deck is readable before you touch anything. The other twenty-four cards wait in the stock and come one at a time, once.

Foundations run up in suit from the aces, and the tableau runs down in suit. What makes the game its own is the way cards travel: pick any card in a column and everything sitting below it lifts with it, whether or not those cards make a sequence.

Lifting a block

What a column will let go of

Working the columns

Australian Patience strategy

Look for same-suit joins before anything else. An exposed card here accepts exactly one other card in the whole deck — its own suit, one rank lower. In Klondike it would accept two, and that single difference is most of what makes this game hard.

Dig out the low cards early. Foundations climb from the aces, so a two or three sitting under three other cards is worth more attention than a king sitting on top.

Ration the stock. Twenty-four cards is nearly half the deck and it comes past once, so every draw should be made with a place for the card already in mind.

Hold a king back if you plan to empty a column. Nothing else may enter one, and there is no redeal to bring you a fresh king later.

Where the columns jam

Three ways a deal gets away from you

Shuffling blocks around because you can

The block rule makes nearly every card mobile, which makes it easy to spend a dozen moves rearranging columns without improving anything. Every block you land buries the card underneath it, and in a suit-building game a buried card usually stays buried.

Spending the stock to see what is there

Twenty-four cards is most of the deck's second half and it passes you once. A draw made without a destination in mind is the same as discarding the card, because the waste only ever offers its top.

Emptying a column with no king to hand

Clearing a column feels like progress and usually is not. Nothing but a king may enter, so an empty column with all four kings buried is dead space — and with no redeal there is no fresh supply of kings coming.

One pass, no redeal

Is Australian Patience winnable?

Often enough to be worth the effort, and less often than Klondike. Suit building is the harshest tableau rule there is, and a single pass through the stock gives you one chance at each of those twenty-four cards.

What it does give you is honesty. Nothing on the table is concealed, so a deal that will not come out was never going to, and you can usually see why. Undo is unlimited, which makes working backwards from a stall a reasonable way to play a hard deal.

The Yukon family

Australian Patience against Yukon and Russian

Three games here move cards the same way. What separates them is how much is hidden and how forgiving the build rule is.

Russian Solitaire is the closest match — same build, same block move — but it puts the whole deck on the table with twenty-one cards face down and gives you no stock at all. Australian Patience trades that hidden depth for a smaller, fully visible tableau and twenty-four cards held in hand.