Limited Solitaire

Sixty-eight held back

How to play Limited Solitaire

Two decks are shuffled together and thirty-six cards go out as twelve columns of three, all face up. Eight foundations are built up in suit from the aces. Columns pack down in suit, one card at a time, and an empty column will take any card.

None of that is unusual for the family. What is unusual is the split: sixty-eight of the 104 cards are in the stock, and you get one pass through them. Two thirds of the deck arrives one card at a time, each one playable only while it sits on top of the waste.

A narrow set of moves

Which moves Limited permits

Working the draw

Limited Solitaire strategy

Keep at least one column empty whenever you can afford to. It is the only landing spot that accepts an unwanted card, and unwanted cards are what the stock deals in.

Build the foundations faster than you would in Forty Thieves. Cards on foundations are cards that can never clog a column, and with two thirds of the deck still to arrive you want the low ranks gone rather than sitting around as targets.

Watch for the second copy. Two decks mean two of every card, so a jack you cannot place now may be placeable when its twin turns up next to a different queen. Knowing which ranks you have already seen twice tells you which columns are genuinely dead.

Slow down in the middle of the pass. The first twenty draws mostly have somewhere to go and the last twenty are usually decided already. It is the middle third, where the columns are filling and the foundations are half built, that rewards thinking.

Where deals stall out

Where Limited deals stall out

Treating the twelve columns as the game

Thirty-six cards on the table against sixty-eight in the stock means the tableau is the smaller half of this game by a distance. Players used to Forty Thieves spend their attention on arranging columns and are surprised when the deal ends with the stock exhausted and the table barely touched. The columns are a staging area for the stock, not the main event.

Filling empty columns from the tableau

Three-card columns empty quickly, which makes gaps feel cheap. They are not — an empty column is the only place a stranded waste card can go, and the stock will hand you stranded cards for sixty-eight consecutive draws. Filling a gap with a card that already had a home wastes the one resource matched to this game's real problem.

Drawing fast through the middle of the stock

There is exactly one pass. Every card you turn past is gone for the rest of the game, and unlike a Klondike-style redeal there is no second look. Slowing down over the middle third of the stock, where the foundations are half built and the columns still have room, is where deals are won.

One pass, what chance

Is Limited Solitaire winnable?

Not often. Strict suit packing with no group moves is punishing to begin with, and putting two thirds of the deck behind a one-card window with no second pass leaves very little room for recovery.

It is more winnable than Sixty Thieves and less so than Maria, whose alternating-colour rule doubles the places a card can go. We do not publish a win rate here: for this family the figure depends almost entirely on whether a version permits a redeal, and this one does not.

How the family splits

How the family splits its cards

Every game here packs the same way except Maria. What separates them is how much of the deck you can see at the start against how much arrives through the waste — and Limited sits at the far end of that scale.

Maria deals exactly the same thirty-six and sixty-eight, from nine columns of four rather than twelve of three. The two games are a clean experiment in what matters more: the shape of the tableau, or the rule for packing it.