Brigade Solitaire

Four aces already up

How to play Brigade Solitaire

The four aces come out of the deck and start the foundations, which leaves forty-eight cards to place: thirty-five in seven piles of five, and thirteen laid out singly as a reserve. Nothing is face down and there is nothing left in hand.

Cards move one at a time. Tableau piles build down by alternating colour, an empty pile takes any card at all, and foundations climb in suit from the ace. The unusual part is that a card already on a foundation can be brought back down again, provided it is the top one.

A single card moves

What a single card may do

Reading the whole deal

Brigade Solitaire strategy

Read the piles before your first move. There is no stock and nothing face down, so the entire problem is already in front of you, and undo costs nothing.

Dig out the low cards. The foundations climb from aces, so twos and threes buried at the bottom of a pile are what the game is short of, not the picture cards on top.

Treat the reserve as thirteen one-shot moves rather than thirteen cards. Each slot empties once and stays empty.

Empty a pile when the chance appears. An empty pile takes any card, which makes it the most useful thing on the table and the only renewable space you have.

Where a visible board still dies

Three ways an open deal locks up

Treating the foundations as free storage

Because a foundation card can come back down, it is tempting to park cards there. But only the top one returns: send the three up, then the four and five, and that three is stuck until both come off again. A card on a foundation is also a card no longer available as a tableau target.

Spending reserve cards for nothing

The thirteen reserve cards are the freest thing you own — each can go anywhere legal at any moment — and each is used exactly once. Playing one on to a tableau pile trades that freedom for a card you have just buried. If the pile underneath was not blocking anything, the trade was a loss.

Reading only the exposed cards

Twenty cards are available on the first move and twenty-eight are buried inside the seven piles. They are all face up, so the order is there to be read, and the difficulty of the deal is almost entirely in that buried order. Scanning only the tops is how a winnable deal gets thrown away in the first ten moves.

Nothing left to draw

Is Brigade Solitaire winnable?

Whether a given deal can be won is fixed before you touch it. There is no stock, no reshuffle and no face-down card, so nothing about the deal can improve or deteriorate — only your line through it.

That does not make it gentle. Twenty-eight of the fifty-two cards start buried, and one low card sitting beneath four higher ones in the same pile can be enough to sink the deal. What it does mean is that a loss is always attributable: the information was there, and unlimited undo lets you go back and find where the line went wrong.

Fully visible games

Brigade among the open boards

Four games here deal every card face up and give you no stock. What separates them is how much spare room they allow.

FreeCell is the useful comparison: four spare slots that refill for ever against Brigade's thirteen that never do. Brigade is far more generous at the start and far poorer by the middle, which is why its difficulty arrives late rather than early. At the other end, Baker's Dozen gives you no spare room at any point, and it is the reversible foundation — which none of the other three have — that keeps Brigade from feeling that airless.