Duchess Solitaire

You pick the base rank

How to play Duchess Solitaire

Twelve cards go out as four fans of three, face up, with only the top card of each available. Four more form a tableau of single cards. The remaining thirty-six become the stock, drawn one card at a time.

Once you have chosen the base rank, foundations build up in suit from it, wrapping past the king and back through the ace. The tableau builds down by alternating colour, and properly alternating runs move as a unit.

Empty columns are the unusual part. You do not choose what fills them: a space takes a reserve card while any remain, then a waste card once the reserve is exhausted, and only when both are gone does the stock supply it. The rule quietly turns clearing a column into a way of spending your reserve rather than a way of gaining freedom.

Spaces fill by priority

What Duchess allows, and in what order

Making the choice count

Duchess Solitaire strategy

Spend real time on move one. Compare each of the four fan tops against the four tableau cards and ask which rank gives you a second move. It is the only genuinely free decision the game offers.

Work the fans from the top down. Twelve reserve cards in four fans means three layers, and a card two deep is invisible until the two above it leave. Clearing a fan entirely also removes one of the four sources that can be pulled into a space.

Hold the redeal until the tableau can absorb cards. A second pass through thirty-six cards is only worth having if there are columns willing to take what turns up. Running it over a gridlocked table wastes it.

Let the foundations wrap. Once a foundation passes the king, the aces and twos you have been ignoring become the cards you need. Players who set the low ranks aside early often find them buried at exactly the wrong moment.

How a good deal unravels

How a promising Duchess deal unravels

Choosing the base rank by which card looks nicest

The four fan tops are the only cards you get to choose between, and the choice governs the whole deal. A base rank that matches cards already sitting on your four tableau columns gives you early foundation moves; one that does not can leave you drawing for twenty cards before anything happens. Look at the tableau before you pick, not just at the fans.

Emptying a column while the reserve is still full

Spaces refill from the reserve automatically and you do not get to choose which card goes in. Clearing a column early is not a gain — it is a way of forcing a reserve card into the tableau at a moment you did not pick. Clear columns once the reserve is thin, when the space becomes yours to use.

Saving the redeal for an emergency that never comes

One redeal through thirty-six cards is not much, and a redeal is only worth taking when the table has changed enough that the same cards will land differently. Hoarding it until the very end usually means running it when the tableau is too clogged to accept anything, which is the same as not having it.

One redeal, what chance

Is Duchess Solitaire winnable?

More often than Canfield, largely because of that opening choice. Being able to pick a base rank that suits the tableau you were dealt removes the single worst thing that can happen in Canfield — a base rank with nothing near it.

Against that, the reserve is only twelve cards rather than thirteen and there is one redeal rather than unlimited passes, so a deal that goes wrong stays wrong. We do not publish a win rate: the figure moves sharply with the redeal count, and this version allows one.

Where the rank comes from

Where the base rank comes from

Four games, one shared idea: foundations that start somewhere other than the ace. What separates them is how much say you have in where, and what happens to a space when you make one.

Duchess is the only row in that first column that says anything other than "dealt to you". It is a small-sounding difference and it is the reason this game is the friendliest way into the Canfield family.