Royal Parade Solitaire

Twenty-four piles of four

How to play Royal Parade Solitaire

Two decks, minus the eight aces, are built into twenty-four suited piles of four cards each. The piles sit in three rows, and which row a card belongs to depends entirely on its rank.

Every pile climbs in steps of three within one suit. A pile in the twos row runs 2, 5, 8, jack. In the threes row, 3, 6, 9, queen. In the fours row, 4, 7, 10, king. Four cards and the pile is done.

Cards reach the parade from eight depot piles, of which only the top card of each is available. When you want more, a deal covers every depot with a fresh card — so the timing of that deal is most of the game.

Rank by row

Which row every rank belongs to

These three sequences never change. Between them they use each rank from 2 to king exactly once, which is why the aces have nowhere to go and are discarded before play.

Joining the parade

What a parade pile will accept

Marshalling the rows

Royal Parade Solitaire strategy

Learn the three sequences before anything else. Almost every wasted move in this game comes from putting a card in the wrong row, and the mapping is printed above.

Hold back on opening new piles. Each row has eight spaces and starting a pile commits you to finding three specific cards in that suit. Open one when you can already see the next card in the sequence.

Squeeze the depot tops before dealing. A deal covers all eight at once, and a useful card buried under a fresh one may not come back.

Clear aces as they surface. They do nothing but block a depot, and moving them out costs nothing.

Where the parade halts

Where a Royal Parade stalls

Dealing to the depots too freely

Each deal covers every depot with a fresh card, and only the top of each depot is available. Deal when you have genuinely run out of parade moves, not when the board looks quiet — a buried card you needed may not surface again.

Filling row spaces with the wrong base rank

Each of the three rows has eight spaces and accepts only its own base rank to start a pile. Committing a space in the twos row means you need the 5, 8 and jack of that exact suit to finish it. Look at what you can already see before opening a new pile.

Forgetting which row a rank belongs to

Every rank from 2 to king lives in exactly one row, and the mapping is not obvious under pressure. A 9 belongs only in the threes row; a 10 only in the fours. Placing by instinct rather than checking is the most common wasted move here.

Odds across two decks

Is Royal Parade Solitaire winnable?

Not often. Twenty-four piles each needing three specific follow-up cards in one suit is a great many separate requirements, and the depots only ever show you eight cards at a time.

What makes it enjoyable rather than merely hard is the arithmetic — the three sequences are fixed and knowable, so a player who has them memorised will place cards far faster and waste far fewer spaces. We do not publish a win rate: it moves with the number of depot deals a version allows.

Interval games

Games that build by intervals

Most patience games move one rank at a time. A small group does not, and the step size changes everything about how you plan.

Calculation is the other interval game here, and it goes further — four foundations each on a different step. Royal Parade uses one step for everything and finds its difficulty in the sheer number of piles instead.