Mrs. Mop Solitaire

Two decks, nothing hidden

How to play Mrs. Mop Solitaire

Two decks go out as thirteen columns of eight cards, all face up. That is the entire game state — there is no stock to draw from, no reserve, and no card you cannot see.

Cards build downward by rank and suit does not matter when you put one down. It matters enormously when you pick one up: only a descending run in a single suit can be lifted as a group. Everything else moves one card at a time.

Assemble a king down to an ace in one suit and it clears itself off the table. Do that eight times and you have won.

What travels together

What travels together and what does not

Cleaning up

Mrs. Mop Solitaire strategy

Pick your suits before you move. Eight runs is a lot, but you do not need all eight at once. Find the two suits whose low cards are least buried and commit to those first.

Prefer same-suit placements even when a cross-suit one is available. Every card placed in suit is a card that will move again for free; every card placed out of suit is a card you will have to shift individually later.

Open a column early and defend it. Thirteen columns of eight is a deep board and a single space is worth more here than several tidy runs — it is the only way to unpick a badly stacked column.

Use the fact that nothing is hidden. Before starting a suit, look for both of its aces. If both are near the bottom of long columns, that suit is not the one to chase.

How an open board locks

How an open board still locks up

Packing across suits because the rule allows it

Placing ignores suit but moving does not, and that gap is the whole game. A tidy 9-8-7 in three different suits is three separate problems: each card has to leave individually before anything under them moves. Every cross-suit placement is a debt you will have to repay one card at a time.

Emptying a column with nothing planned for it

Thirteen columns is the widest board here and a space is the only manoeuvring room the game offers — there is no stock and no reserve. Filling one with a card that already had somewhere to go converts your only free resource into nothing.

Chasing a run before its low cards are reachable

Building a ♠ run down to the six is worthless if both black aces are sitting under six cards elsewhere. Because everything is visible, you can check where the aces and twos of a suit are before committing twenty moves to that suit. Do it.

Mrs. Mop's real difficulty

Is Mrs. Mop Solitaire winnable?

More often than Spider, and by some distance — no hidden cards and no stock rows dropping on your work removes the two things that ruin Spider deals. It is still a two-deck game with eight runs to build, so it is long rather than easy.

The losses come from cross-suit packing done early and cheerfully, then paid for later. We do not publish a win rate: for this family the figure depends almost entirely on how many cards are hidden and how the stock behaves, and Mrs. Mop hides nothing and has no stock at all.

Among the run-builders

Where Mrs. Mop sits among the run-builders

Four games with the same packing rule and the same goal of suited king-to-ace runs. What separates them is how much they let you see and whether anything arrives uninvited.

If two decks and eight runs is more than you want, Simple Simon is the same game at half the size and is the sensible place to learn the suit rule.