Maria Solitaire

Colour down, suit up

How to play Maria Solitaire

Thirty-six cards go out as nine columns of four, face up, from a two-deck pack. Eight foundations build up in suit from the aces. The remaining sixty-eight cards form a stock you draw one card at a time, once.

Columns build downward by alternating colour. A red eight goes on a black nine, a black seven on that red eight, and so on. Suit is irrelevant on the tableau and decisive on the foundations, which is the split that catches people out.

As everywhere in this family, only one card moves at a time. There are no group moves however neatly a run is arranged, and an empty column accepts any single card.

Two rules, two places

Colour on the columns, suit on the foundations

Restraint

Maria Solitaire strategy

Resist the tidy run. Just because a card fits does not mean it should go there. Ask whether the move uncovers something, empties a column, or feeds a foundation — and if it does none of those, leave the card where it is.

Keep the foundations in view. They are still suit-strict, so the cards that matter most are the low ones of each suit, and they can be buried under a run that looks perfectly healthy.

Nine columns is not many. Maria has the narrowest tableau in the family, so a gap is rarer here than in Limited and correspondingly more valuable. Do not fill one to make a move you could have made elsewhere.

Use the doubled options to keep columns short rather than long. The colour rule is best spent relocating awkward cards off the tops of columns, not on building elegant sequences down them.

How a comfortable deal turns

How a comfortable Maria deal turns

Building long alternating runs because you can

The colour rule makes it easy to assemble 10♥ 9♠ 8♦ 7♣ down a column, and it feels like progress. With no group moves it is the opposite: you have created four cards that must each be relocated individually, each needing its own opposite-coloured target, before anything beneath them moves. In Forty Thieves the strict rule prevents you from digging this hole. Maria hands you the shovel.

Forgetting the foundations never relaxed

The tableau ignores suit, the foundations do not. It is easy to spend twenty moves shuffling by colour and realise you have buried the 3♦ your diamond foundation has been waiting for. Check the eight foundations before every tableau move, because they are the only part of Maria still playing by Forty Thieves rules.

Spending gaps on cards that already had a home

Nine columns is the fewest in the family, so gaps are scarcer here than in Limited and there are fewer places for the sixty-eight incoming cards to land. A gap filled by a card that could have gone on a column is a gap sold at a loss.

What the colour rule is worth

Is Maria Solitaire winnable?

More often than anything else in this family. The alternating-colour rule is a large concession in a group of games defined by how little they concede, and it shows.

It is still a one-pass, no-group-move, two-deck game, so it is not easy in absolute terms — and the deals it loses tend to be ones the player buried personally rather than ones that were dealt badly. We do not publish a win rate: across this family the number depends almost entirely on the redeal rule, and this version has none.

One word apart

What the colour rule is worth

The family is otherwise identical in structure: two or three decks, no group moves, one pass, suit-strict foundations. Maria is the only one that changes the packing rule, and the fourth column shows what that buys.

Limited is the useful comparison: it deals the same thirty-six cards and the same sixty-eight card stock, but packs by suit. Playing the two back to back is the clearest way to feel what a single word in the rules is worth.