Russian Solitaire

Blocks and buried cards

How to play Russian Solitaire

All fifty-two cards are dealt to the table. Column one holds a single card; each of the other six holds a run of face-down cards followed by five face-up ones, with one more hidden card in every column as you move right. Twenty-one cards start face down, and there is no stock, no waste and no reserve.

You may select any face-up card anywhere in any column, and every card sitting on top of it travels with it — jumbled, unordered, irrelevant. Only the card you picked has to land legally, which is the most generous move rule in solitaire and is borrowed directly from Yukon.

Then Russian takes it back. Where Yukon lets a card land on either of the two opposite-colour cards one rank up, Russian demands the exact suit. The move rule is unchanged; the number of places you can use it is halved.

Same suit, no exceptions

What packs on what in Russian

Building in suit

Russian Solitaire strategy

Work right to left. Column seven hides six cards and column one hides none, so the difficulty is concentrated at the right-hand end. Those columns need the most moves to unpick, and the longer you leave them the fewer cards you have spare to do it with.

Build suit runs where they will not need moving again. An ordered same-suit sequence is expensive to assemble here, so put it somewhere it can stay — on a column whose face-down cards you have already cleared, rather than on top of three unknowns.

Send low cards up early. Aces and twos to the foundations are almost always right, and because tableau destinations are so scarce, the foundations are a genuinely useful release valve in a way they are not in Yukon.

Look at what a packet is carrying. The passengers do not need to fit, but they land somewhere, and in a game where each card has one home you will regret dropping four cards on top of the 9 of clubs you needed. Read the pile before you move it.

Three ways the suit rule bites

Where Russian deals become unwinnable

Moving a packet before you know where the next one goes

The packet rule makes it trivially easy to shift a pile. It does not make it easy to shift it back. Because a card only ever fits on one specific card in the deck, a packet parked in the wrong place may have no legal destination for the rest of the game.

Chasing a reveal that costs you an ordered run

Same-suit runs are painfully slow to assemble here, so breaking one to uncover a face-down card is a much worse trade than it is in Yukon. Weigh the reveal against how many moves the run took to build.

Emptying a column with no king in reach

A space is the strongest asset in the game and it takes a king. With twenty-one cards face down, the king you need may not exist as far as you are concerned. Locate at least one reachable king before you spend moves opening a column.

Russian's hard odds

Is Russian Solitaire winnable?

Not often. Russian is generally reckoned one of the hardest one-deck games in the standard repertoire, and the reasons are entirely structural: exact-suit packing halves every option, twenty-one cards are hidden, spaces need kings, and there is no stock to redistribute anything.

Skill still moves the needle more than in most hard games, because the packet rule means very few positions are mechanically locked — you can almost always do something. The difficulty is that most of the somethings are wrong. We do not publish a figure: Russian versions differ on whether any card may fill a space, and that alone changes the answer substantially.

Strict, and no stock

Russian against the rest of the packet games

All four of these move cards the same way. What separates them is what the lead card is allowed to land on, and whether anything arrives to help.

Alaska is the interesting middle ground: same-suit like Russian, but a packet may build up or down, which restores a good deal of the flexibility the suit rule takes away. If Russian feels airless, that is the one to try before going back to Yukon.