Forty Thieves Solitaire

Forty on the table

How to play Forty Thieves Solitaire

Two decks are shuffled together and forty cards are dealt into ten columns of four, all face up. Eight empty foundations wait above, two per suit, and the remaining sixty-four cards sit in the stock.

Foundations build up by suit from ace to king. The tableau builds down by suit as well — not by colour, by the actual suit — and only the top card of a column ever moves. There are no packets and no shortcuts.

You draw one card at a time to the waste, and you get exactly one pass. When the stock is empty the game is whatever is left in front of you. Nothing recycles.

The rule that does the damage

What same-suit packing actually costs

"Build down by suit instead of colour" sounds like a minor tightening. It is not — it halves the number of cards that can legally land anywhere, and in a game with no redeal that is the difference between a puzzle and a wall.

Take an 8 on top of a column and count what can legally land on it, with the same 104 cards on the table. The comparison is with the packing rules of Klondike, which only asks for the opposite colour, and one-suit Spider, where any 7 at all will do.

One card, one suit

What strict suit packing rules out

How to survive it

Forty Thieves Solitaire strategy

Hoard empty columns. A space is the only place in the game where any card can go, and it is the only tool you have for unpicking a badly stacked column. Opening one is worth several moves of setup, and filling one carelessly is the most expensive mistake available.

Keep columns short rather than tidy. Since only the top card moves, depth is the enemy: a column of eight cards is eight separate problems, and a neat descending run buried under them helps nobody. Given the choice, play to flatten the board.

Get aces and twos up immediately, then slow down. With eight foundations and two decks, the low cards clog the tableau badly if left, but past the 3s and 4s a card on a foundation is a card the tableau can no longer use — and it never comes back.

Track both copies of the cards you need. Every rank exists twice in each suit. If one 7 of hearts is buried at the bottom of a column, the other is your real target, and knowing where it is changes which column you should be digging.

Where the table falls apart

Where Forty Thieves deals fall apart

Filling an empty column with the wrong card

A space is the only place in Forty Thieves where you get a genuinely free choice, and there are only ever a handful in a deal. Dropping a random king into one to clear the waste spends your most valuable asset on your least valuable problem.

Building a long tidy run

Because only the top card moves, a packed 10-9-8-7 of clubs is not an achievement — it is four cards you have to unpick one at a time, and each one needs its own destination. Short columns with useful top cards beat long ordered ones.

Drawing through the stock to see what is there

One pass, sixty-four cards, no way back. Every card you pass over is out of the game unless you can use it right now. Cycling for information is a Klondike habit and it loses Forty Thieves deals.

Forty Thieves' hard odds

Is Forty Thieves Solitaire winnable?

Rarely, and it is meant to be. Forty Thieves is widely regarded as one of the hardest classic patience games, and the reasons are all structural rather than luck: suit packing halves every option, single-card movement removes every shortcut, the stock runs once, and foundations never give anything back.

Skill matters more here than in most hard games, because the whole board is visible. A player who protects spaces and refuses to draw carelessly will win far more than one who does not. But many deals simply cannot be finished, and recognising one early is a skill in itself.

We do not publish a win rate. Variants differ on redeals, column count and whether sequences move — Josephine allows packed runs to travel and is dramatically easier as a result — so any single figure would describe a different game.

The Napoleon family

Forty Thieves and its many relatives

This is one of the most-varied games in patience, and nearly every variant exists to make it survivable. The column below that matters most is the move rule.

If Forty Thieves appeals but the single-card rule is what defeats you, Josephine is the same game with sequences allowed to move — the most useful of all the variants, and the one to try first.