Picture Patience

Aces up, kings down

How to play Picture Patience

Two decks give you two of every card, and the eight foundations are arranged to want exactly that: for each suit, one pile climbs from the ace to the king and another descends from the king to the ace. Between them they take all twenty-six cards of that suit.

Nine cards sit face up in a small grid, and the rest wait in the stock. A reserve card or the waste top may go to a foundation and nowhere else — there is no tableau to build on and no way to put a card down temporarily.

Fits or waits

What the foundations will take

Feeding the nine

Picture Patience strategy

Advance both directions of a suit together. A suit whose ace-up pile has reached the eight while its king-down pile is still on the queen will strand every low card of that suit you turn up.

Play from the reserve before drawing whenever both are possible. The slot you open will take the waste top, which is the only way to shrink the waste other than playing its top card.

When the same rank is available in the reserve and on the waste, take the reserve one. The slot that opens will pull the waste card in anyway, so you get both.

Remember the redeal is single. Ninety-five cards go past, and everything you could not use comes back exactly once, in the order you buried it.

Where a card gets stranded

Three ways the waste wins

Feeding one direction of a suit and not the other

Every suit needs a full thirteen climbing from the ace and a full thirteen descending from the king. Play only to the ace-up piles and the second copy of each low card has nowhere to go, because the king-down pile has not come far enough to want it yet. The two halves of a suit have to advance roughly together.

Drawing before checking the reserve

Playing a reserve card is the only thing that pulls a card out of the waste. Draw first and the waste simply grows; play the reserve card first and the slot swallows the card you just drew. The order of those two actions decides how deep the waste gets.

Letting the waste bury something you need

Only the waste top is reachable, so a card that goes under three others is gone until the redeal — and there is exactly one redeal. Every card you drop on the waste is a card placed on top of everything already stranded there.

One redeal

Is Picture Patience winnable?

Less often than most games here, and for a structural reason rather than a harsh rule. With no tableau there is nothing to hold a card that arrives too early or too late — the reserve does not store cards, it only presents them. A deal that does not roughly sort itself is not going to be talked into it.

Where skill does show is in the reserve. Choosing which of several playable cards to release, and when to draw rather than play, changes how much of the waste you recover before the single redeal. Two players given the same deal will not finish on the same number.

Somewhere else to put it

Picture Patience among the two-way foundation games

Four games here use the same eight foundations, two decks and the same up-and-down building. They differ almost entirely in how much room they give you outside those piles.

Read down that fourth column and the family arranges itself into a scale. Algerian is the most forgiving, Colorado gives you twenty piles that take anything, Crazy Quilt lets you build on the waste itself — and Picture Patience gives you nothing at all. Everything else about the four is nearly identical.