Calculation Solitaire

Counting by ones to fours

How to play Calculation Solitaire

An ace, a 2, a 3 and a 4 are pulled from the deck to start four foundations. Each then climbs by its own interval: the ace foundation goes up in ones, the 2 in twos, the 3 in threes, the 4 in fours. Every sequence wraps past the king and continues from the ace, and every one of them ends on a king thirteen cards later.

Cards come off the stock one at a time. Each must be placed before you see the next, and there are only two possible destinations: a foundation that wants exactly that rank, or one of the four waste piles. Waste piles take anything, but only their top card can be played later.

Suits are completely irrelevant throughout. This is a game about rank arithmetic and about where you choose to put the cards you cannot use yet.

The reference

The four sequences in full

These never change from deal to deal. Learning them, or keeping them in view, is the single biggest thing you can do to play the game well.

Where a card may go

Where each turned card is allowed to go

Thinking three moves on

Calculation Solitaire strategy

Keep the four needed ranks in your head. At any moment each foundation wants exactly one rank, and those four cards are the only ones that matter. Before placing anything, check whether it is one of them.

Give each waste pile a rough job. A common approach is to keep one pile for high cards, one for low, and one as a dumping ground for cards already used by all four foundations — those are genuinely dead and can be buried without cost.

Never bury a rank two foundations still want. Some ranks appear early in one sequence and late in another, so a single card can be needed twice at very different times. Those are the cards to keep on top.

Watch the by-1s foundation. It is the slowest to become useful, because it needs the ranks in plain order and takes the longest to reach the high cards. The interval foundations often run ahead of it, and the kings all arrive at the very end.

Where deals are lost

Where Calculation deals are lost

Treating the waste piles as one pile

Four piles is four choices, and each one buries its previous top card. Dropping every awkward card onto the same pile turns four escape routes into one and buries three useful cards under it. Spread them deliberately.

Burying a rank you can see coming

The sequences are fixed and printed below, so you always know what each foundation needs next. Putting that exact card into the middle of a waste pile is the single most common way to lose, and it is entirely avoidable — check the four needed ranks before every placement.

Keeping the waste piles ordered by habit

There is no benefit to stacking a waste pile in sequence. What matters is which card is on top and how useful it is. A pile whose top card is a rank two foundations want is worth more than a tidy one.

Skill over shuffle

Is Calculation Solitaire winnable?

Not often, but it is one of the few games where playing well genuinely changes the answer. Everything you need to know is printed above — the sequences never vary — so a player who tracks the four wanted ranks and places waste cards deliberately will win far more than one who does not.

The luck is in the order the stock arrives, and with only four waste piles there is a hard limit on how much bad order you can absorb. We do not publish a figure: published rates for Calculation vary widely with the number of waste piles allowed, and this page uses four.

Arithmetic games

Calculation among the planning games

A small group of solitaire games give you almost no board and almost all the decisions. These are the ones on this site.

Strategy is the purest of the group — it removes the arithmetic entirely and leaves nothing but the sorting decision. Clock Patience sits at the other end as a control: same reliance on rank, zero decisions.