Gargantua Solitaire

Klondike at double size

How to play Gargantua Solitaire

Forty-five cards go out as a nine-column staircase, one to nine cards deep, with only the bottom card of each column face up. The remaining fifty-nine cards form the stock. Eight foundations — two per suit — are built up from the aces.

Columns build down by alternating colour, and any correctly alternating run moves as a unit regardless of length. Face-down cards flip the moment the card above them leaves, and an empty column can only be started by a king.

The stock is drawn one card at a time and may be recycled once. That second pass is the entire margin the game gives you, which is what separates Gargantua from Klondike, where you can cycle the waste as often as you like.

Across nine columns

What nine columns will accept

Working nine columns

Gargantua Solitaire strategy

Attack the deepest columns first. The nine-card column hides eight cards and the one-card column hides none. Cards freed from the right-hand end of the table are worth several taken from the left.

Treat the first pass as reconnaissance. Fifty-nine cards go by once before you can see any of them again, and knowing which kings and aces are in the stock changes which tableau moves are worth making.

Hold low cards back. With eight foundations it is tempting to bank everything, but twos and threes on the tableau are what let you shift the cards above the face-down ones.

Move whole runs when it uncovers something. Unlimited sequence moves are the most generous rule in this game — use them to expose face-down cards rather than to tidy the table.

Where the table locks

Where Gargantua tables lock up

Emptying a column with no king in sight

Nine columns and only eight kings in two decks means you can never open every column, and a space you cannot fill is dead weight. Before you clear the last card off a column, know where a reachable king is. If the answer is 'buried under four face-down cards', the space will sit empty for a long time.

Playing to the foundations too early

Thirty-six hidden cards means the tableau is where the work is, and low cards are the tools that let you dig. A 3♥ banked on a foundation is a 3♥ that cannot accept the 2♠ you needed to shift. Send cards up when they are genuinely surplus, not on sight.

Burning the first pass without a plan

Fifty-nine cards drawn one at a time is a long pass, and you only get two of them. The first pass is for exposing what the stock holds and taking the moves that dig into the tableau; the second is for the cards you deliberately left. Drawing quickly through both is how deals end with twenty face-down cards still on the table.

Two passes only

Is Gargantua Solitaire winnable?

Less often than Klondike, and the pass limit is why. Two decks and nine columns give you more material to work with, but thirty-six hidden cards and only one recycle of the waste means a badly stacked column often stays buried for the whole deal.

If you find it too tight, Harp is the same deal with four passes instead of two. We do not publish a win rate: for this family the number is almost entirely a function of the pass limit, and this version allows two.

Double-size Klondike

The two-deck Klondike shapes

Three variants on the same idea, plus the single-deck original. The pass column is the one that decides how hard each one plays.

Gargantua and Harp deal identically — same nine columns, same fifty-nine card stock — and differ only in that pass count. Batsford is the genuine outlier: an extra column, ten more cards buried, and a single pass, offset by a reserve square that holds a king.