Cruel Solitaire

Twelve piles of four

How to play Cruel Solitaire

The four aces come out of the deck and go straight on to the foundations. The remaining forty-eight cards are dealt as twelve piles of four, every card face up, and only the top card of each pile can be moved.

Those cards go either on to a foundation, climbing in suit from the ace, or on to another pile's top card of the same suit one rank higher. There are no group moves and no use for an empty pile — when a pile clears, the space is gone for good.

When you run out of moves there is a Deal button, and understanding exactly what it does is most of what separates a good Cruel player from a frustrated one.

Onto a pile top

What a Cruel pile will take

Timing the redeals

Cruel Solitaire strategy

Read the piles before redealing. Count through them in fours and picture where the new boundaries will fall. If no useful card lands on top, the redeal is not the move.

Play foundation cards to shift the cut, not just to bank progress. Each card removed moves every later boundary by one position, which is your only lever over what the redeal produces.

Keep low cards exposed where you can. With twelve visible cards and strict same-suit building, a 3 on top of a pile is far more useful than a jack.

Treat emptying a pile as a real decision. It changes the redeal arithmetic more than any single move, and it permanently removes one of your twelve landing squares.

The dead ends

How Cruel earns its name

Redealing as if it were a shuffle

It is not one. The redeal keeps every card in the same order and simply re-partitions the sequence into fresh groups of four. Cards that were buried near the bottom of a pile move up only if the regrouping happens to cut in a different place — which is why the redeal can look almost identical to what you had.

Emptying a pile without counting the cost

Emptying a pile is the only way to change where the redeal cuts, because twelve piles of four becomes eleven piles once four cards are gone. But an empty pile is dead ground for the rest of the deal, so the change comes at the price of a landing square you cannot get back.

Playing every available foundation card on sight

Foundations are safe but the tableau is where the game is decided. A 3♣ left on top of a pile is a landing spot for the 2♣; banked on the foundation it is a spot you no longer have. With only twelve exposed cards, targets are scarce.

The reputation

Is Cruel Solitaire winnable?

Sometimes, and less often than the unlimited redeal suggests. Strict same-suit building with only twelve exposed cards is a narrow game, and a redeal that preserves the order cannot rescue a sequence that is fundamentally in the wrong arrangement.

What makes it worth playing is that the difficulty is entirely legible: everything is face up and the redeal is computable, so there is no luck once the cards are down. We do not publish a win rate — for this game the figure depends heavily on whether a version shuffles the redeal, and this one does not.

Second chances

Four pile games and their second chances

All four deal the whole pack into small piles, build within a pile only, and treat an emptied pile as gone. What separates them is what happens when you run out of moves.

Cruel and Crescent are the two whose second chance involves no randomness whatsoever. That makes them the only games in this group where you can decide whether a redeal is worth taking rather than hoping.