Colorado Solitaire

A card at a time

How to play Colorado Solitaire

Twenty cards go out as twenty single-card piles. Eight foundations sit above them, empty. The remaining eighty-four cards are the stock, and they come to you one at a time.

Each drawn card must be placed before the next appears, and there are only two kinds of destination: a foundation that wants exactly that card, or any one of the twenty piles. A card put on a pile covers whatever was showing there.

Cards leave a pile only for a foundation. There is no moving between piles, no waste to fall back on and no redeal — so the placement decision is the entire game.

One card, twenty choices

Where a drawn card is allowed to go

Choosing among twenty

Colorado Solitaire strategy

Check both foundations of a suit before placing a middle rank. One climbs and one descends, and each card has two possible homes — but only two copies exist.

Cover dead cards, not live ones. A pile topped by a card no foundation will want for twenty turns is the right place for an awkward draw.

Keep several piles shallow. Depth is invisible and irreversible, so a board of five deep piles and fifteen shallow ones is far healthier than twenty of equal height.

Do not hoard low cards. Aces and kings start foundations, so send them up immediately — they do nothing useful sitting on a pile.

When room runs out

How twenty piles run out of room

Dropping awkward cards on the nearest pile

Twenty piles is a great deal of room and it lulls you into placing without thinking. Every card you drop buries the one underneath it, and a pile whose top card is dead is a pile that has stopped being useful. Choose the pile whose current top card you least need.

Sending both copies of a rank the same way

Each suit has one foundation climbing and one descending, so a seven can serve either — and there are only two sevens of each suit in the pack. Commit both to the same pile and the opposite one stalls waiting for a card that is already gone.

Filling piles evenly

Spreading cards across all twenty piles equally wastes the layout. A better shape is a handful of piles kept shallow and useful, with two or three treated as a dumping ground for high cards that neither foundation wants yet.

Single-pass odds

Is Colorado Solitaire winnable?

Reasonably often, and it rewards care more than most. Twenty piles is genuinely generous, and the two-directional foundations mean most cards have somewhere to go eventually.

What loses deals is the accumulated cost of careless placement — a hundred small decisions, none individually fatal. We do not publish a win rate: the figure would depend almost entirely on how well the deals were played rather than on how they were dealt.

One question per card

Games that ask one question per card

A small family gives you no tableau to build on and asks only where each card should be parked. They differ in how much parking there is and how the foundations behave.

Strategy is the same idea at a quarter of the scale and is the better place to learn the discipline. Colorado is what that discipline looks like when the board is large enough to hide your mistakes for a long time.