La Belle Lucie Solitaire

Fifty-two in threes

How to play La Belle Lucie Solitaire

The deck goes out as seventeen fans of three cards and one lonely fan of a single card. Every card is face up, so there is no hidden information at any point — but only the last card of each fan can be touched, which means eighteen of the fifty-two are live and the rest are spectators.

Those exposed cards move one at a time on to a card of the same suit one rank higher, or up to the foundations, which start with the aces and build in suit. There are no group moves and no way to use a gap: when a fan runs out, the space it leaves behind is simply gone.

That combination — full information, tiny mobility — is what gives the game its character. You can see the deal you have been handed. You usually cannot do much about it, and the two reshuffles are the only lever you hold.

What the fans accept

What the fans will and will not take

A rule worth pausing on

An emptied fan never comes back

Almost every other patience game rewards you for clearing a pile. Klondike lets a king move into the space, FreeCell treats an empty column as the most powerful resource on the table, and Flower Garden will take any card at all into an empty bed. La Belle Lucie does none of this. The gap stays a gap for the rest of the game.

The practical consequence is that fans are not obstacles to be cleared, they are landing squares to be protected. Eighteen fans means eighteen possible targets; every one you empty drops that number permanently, and the last few moves of a losing deal are usually spent staring at four or five surviving fans with nothing that fits any of them.

This flips the usual instinct. Prefer the move that keeps a useful card exposed on a short fan over the move that clears a fan entirely, unless clearing it puts real cards on the foundations.

Spending the reshuffles

La Belle Lucie Solitaire strategy

Read the whole table before your first move. Everything is face up, so the information is free — and the single most useful thing you can learn is which of your low cards are trapped beneath the cards they need.

Get the aces and twos out early, but not blindly. Foundation cards are safe cards, and every one you bank is a card the reshuffle cannot scatter. The exception is a low card doing useful work as a target for something you can already reach.

Work the fans that are three deep. A card buried under two others is worth more free than a card buried under one, so given a choice of equally good moves, take the one that unblocks the deepest card.

Count what a move actually gains. In a game with no gaps and no group moves, a move that neither advances a foundation nor exposes a new card is usually a move that cost you a target for nothing.

Three costly habits

Three ways a deal dies before the last reshuffle

Reshuffling the moment you are stuck

The reshuffle is not an emergency button, it is one of exactly two chances to rearrange the deck. Spending it the first time you run dry — often after a dozen moves, with the foundations barely started — throws away most of its value. A reshuffle is worth far more once several low cards are already on the foundations, because there is less left in the tableau and the shuffle has less to spoil.

Emptying a fan for no reason

In Klondike or FreeCell, clearing a column is the strongest thing you can do. Here it is close to the worst. An empty fan cannot be refilled, so every fan you clear is a landing square permanently removed from the board. Clear one only when the cards it gave up genuinely advanced the foundations.

Playing a card that was already a useful target

A 9♠ sitting on top of a fan is not just a card waiting to move — it is the landing spot for the 8♠. Moving it on to a 10♠ elsewhere is a real gain only if the 8♠ can follow. If it cannot, you have shortened one fan and destroyed a target, which is two steps backwards dressed as progress.

Two reshuffles, how far

Is La Belle Lucie Solitaire winnable?

Often not. The game is famously stingy: no gaps, no group moves, and only eighteen live cards at any moment mean a bad arrangement stays bad. The two reshuffles are what keep it from being a coin flip, and using them well is most of the skill on offer.

Skill is real here even so, because the full information means every mistake is yours. We do not publish a win rate: it depends enormously on the number of reshuffles allowed, and rule sets vary from none to three. This page gives two.

The open-table games

La Belle Lucie against the other open-table games

These four deal the whole deck face up and give you no stock at all. What separates them is how much the tableau will let you move — and the last column counts how many of the fifty-two cards you can actually touch on move one.

Shamrocks is the direct comparison: the same eighteen fans, but building up or down in any suit instead of down in one. It hands back with one rule most of what La Belle Lucie takes away — and then removes the reshuffles.