Monte Carlo Solitaire

A grid that closes up

How to play Monte Carlo Solitaire

Twenty-five cards are laid out face up in a five-by-five grid, with the other twenty-seven held back in a stock. Find two cards of the same rank that are touching, and remove them both.

Touching means genuinely adjacent in the grid: left, right, above, below, or any of the four diagonals. Suit is completely irrelevant — two 9s of any suits will do, and two consecutive ranks will not.

When a pair leaves, the grid closes the gaps. Every remaining card slides forward in reading order, and fresh cards come off the stock to fill the end. Clear all twenty-six pairs and you have cleared the deck.

Adjacency rules

Which pairs the grid will remove

Working the grid

Monte Carlo Solitaire strategy

Scan the whole grid before removing anything. Because compaction changes every adjacency, the order you take pairs in matters far more than in a fixed-layout game. Find all the available pairs first, then decide which to spend.

Prefer pairs near the end of the grid when you want stability. Removing from the last row disturbs almost nothing; removing from the first row drags every card on the board forward. Early on, churn is good — it brings new cards in. Later, when the stock is nearly gone, churn is how you scatter a winnable position.

Watch for ranks with three or four cards showing. If three 8s are on the board, which two you pair decides whether the fourth ends up next to something useful or stranded in a corner. This is the closest thing Monte Carlo has to long-term planning.

Keep an eye on the stock count. Once it is empty the grid stops refilling, and from that point the board only shrinks. Every pair after that has to come from what is already in front of you.

Three grid mistakes

How a Monte Carlo grid seizes up

Taking the first pair you see

Every removal reshuffles the geometry, because the cards behind the gap slide forward. A pair you take now may separate two cards that were about to become neighbours. When several pairs are available, look at what each one leaves touching.

Clearing the front of the grid

Compaction pulls cards toward the top-left, so removing pairs from the early positions drags the whole board forward and brings fresh stock in at the end. Removing from the back disturbs far less. Early in a deal that churn is useful; late on, when the stock is thin, it is how a solvable board becomes a scattered one.

Forgetting there are four of every rank

Two 6s touching is not the only 6 pair on the board. If two 6s are adjacent and a third 6 sits next to a fourth elsewhere, taking the wrong two can leave the remaining pair stranded at opposite corners.

Monte Carlo's odds

Is Monte Carlo Solitaire winnable?

Often enough to be satisfying, and the compaction rule is why. A fixed-layout pairing game stalls the moment the right cards are not next to each other; here the board keeps rearranging, so a position that looks dead frequently is not — it just needs a pair removed somewhere else first.

Skill is real but shallow. There are no hidden cards and no long chains to plan, so the whole game is choosing between the two or three pairs available and thinking one compaction ahead. We do not publish a win rate: Monte Carlo versions differ on whether diagonals count at all, and that alone changes the game enormously.

Pairing relatives

Monte Carlo among the pairing games

All four of these clear a board by removing cards rather than building anything. What separates them is what decides whether two cards can go.

Monte Carlo is the only one of the four where the board itself is in motion. If you like the same-rank pairing but want a fixed layout to reason about, Pyramid gives you that with a different matching rule.