Bowling Solitaire

Pins and balls

How to play Bowling Solitaire

Each frame gives you ten empty pin spaces arranged as a bowling triangle, and one card at a time off the deck. Your job is to fill all ten — but the cards you put in them have to read low to high from pin 1 through pin 10.

Pin numbers have nothing to do with card ranks. A king can sit in pin 2, provided nothing higher than a king is in pin 1, which it cannot be. What matters is only that the sequence across the ten positions never goes down. Equal ranks are fine.

When a card fits nowhere legal, it goes to a ball column instead. Ball 1 takes three cards, then Ball 2 takes over — and how many pins you have filled by the time each fills up is what decides your frame.

Pin by pin

Which pin will take the card

Rolling well

Bowling Solitaire strategy

Work from the outside in. Pin 1 and pin 10 are the cheapest placements on the board, because each constrains only one side. A card dropped into pin 5 sets a floor for four pins and a ceiling for five at the same time.

Match extremes to ends. Aces and 2s belong near pin 1; kings and queens near pin 10. Putting a 3 into pin 8 is legal and will cost you the frame, because pins 9 and 10 then need cards of 3 or higher and you have wasted the whole top of the range.

Watch Ball 1 rather than the pins. Three cards is all it holds, and it is your strike clock. With two already in it, a placement that might not work is worth far less than one that definitely will.

Accept open frames. Ten frames is a long game and chasing a strike from a bad position usually turns a seven-pin frame into a four-pin one. Bank what you have and take the next frame cleanly.

Where frames are lost

Where frames get thrown away

Filling the middle pins early

A card placed in pin 5 constrains everything on both sides of it at once — pins 1 to 4 must all be lower and pins 6 to 10 all higher. Placing at the ends costs you far less freedom, and the ends are where extreme cards belong anyway.

Putting a mid-value card at an end

Pin 1 should take your lowest card and pin 10 your highest. A 7 in pin 1 means every one of the other nine pins now needs a 7 or better, and there are only so many of those in a deck.

Forgetting Ball 1 is the strike clock

Ball 1 holds three cards and nothing warns you as it fills. Once the third lands, a strike is off the table for that frame regardless of how the pins look. Count what is in it before deciding whether to take a risky placement.

Chasing 300

Can you actually bowl 300?

In principle. A perfect game needs twelve strikes, which means filling all ten pins before Ball 1 fills, twelve times in a row — and Ball 1 fills after three unplaceable cards. In practice you will have open frames, and a respectable score is a good deal short of 300.

That is what makes the scoring worth having. Most solitaire games are binary, but Bowling gives you a number, so a deal that goes badly is still a result you can try to beat. We do not publish an average: the numbered-pin version varies between implementations on ball capacity, and that changes the arithmetic completely.

Numbered pins

Bowling among the scored and value games

Most solitaire games ask whether you won. Two on this site ask how well, and two more are about card values rather than suits.

Cribbage Solitaire is the other scored game here and the closest thing to a companion piece — both borrow a familiar scoring system and wrap a solitaire around it.