Josephine Solitaire

Forty Thieves with runs

How to play Josephine Solitaire

Two decks are shuffled together and forty cards go into ten columns of four, all face up. Eight foundations wait above — two per suit — and the remaining sixty-four sit in the stock, good for exactly one pass.

Tableau columns build down by exact suit, and foundations build up by exact suit from ace to king. Empty columns accept any available card. So far this is Forty Thieves in every particular.

The difference is that a descending run in one suit moves as a single unit. A packed 10-9-8-7 of spades goes onto a jack of spades in one move, rather than needing four separate moves and four separate legal destinations. That is the whole variant.

Packing and lifting

What Josephine lets you move as a unit

Moving runs well

Josephine Solitaire strategy

Build runs deliberately, not incidentally. A long suited sequence is now an asset rather than a liability, so when you have a choice of placements, prefer the one that extends a run you may want to relocate later.

Save spaces for runs. An empty column that receives a five-card sequence has done five times the work of one that receives a single card, and spaces are just as scarce here as in Forty Thieves. Do not fill one to clear the waste unless there is nothing better.

Keep columns shallow anyway. Runs move, but only unbroken same-suit runs — and a column of eight mixed cards is still eight problems. The freedom applies to sequences you have built, not to the mess underneath them.

Track both copies of the ranks you need. Every rank exists twice in each suit. If one 7 of hearts is at the bottom of a column, the other one is the card that matters, and knowing where it is decides which column is worth digging.

Where deals fall apart

Where Josephine deals still fall apart

Breaking a run to reach one card underneath

A long suited run is expensive to assemble and is your most mobile asset. Taking it apart for a single card beneath it usually costs more than the card is worth — and reassembling it means finding a home for every card again.

Filling a space with a lone card

Spaces take runs, which is what makes them powerful. Dropping a single 6 into one converts a slot that could have received a five-card sequence into a column that will accept exactly one card. Use spaces for runs whenever you can.

Drawing through the stock to see what is coming

One pass and sixty-four cards. Every card you draw past is out of the game unless you played it there and then. Cycling for information is a habit learned from games with unlimited passes, and it is the most reliable way to lose a Josephine deal.

Josephine's chances

Is Josephine Solitaire winnable?

Far more often than Forty Thieves, and it is the variant most worth knowing for exactly that reason. Moving runs as a unit removes the grinding quality of the original without touching what makes it interesting — the strict suits, the single stock pass, the scarcity of spaces.

It is still a hard two-deck game. Everything is visible, so a loss is generally traceable to a decision, most often a careless draw. We do not publish a figure, because the difference between this page and the Forty Thieves page is precisely the kind of rule change that makes a borrowed win rate meaningless.

Runs move, rules stay

Josephine among the Forty Thieves variants

This family exists almost entirely to make Forty Thieves survivable, and each member picks a different restriction to lift.

Josephine lifts the movement rule; Maria lifts the suit rule instead, packing by alternating colour. Between them they cover the two things that make Forty Thieves hard, and neither touches the one pass through the stock.