Seahaven Towers Solitaire

Two towers already full

How to play Seahaven Towers

Fifty cards go into ten columns of five, all face up. The two left over are placed into two of the four tower cells along the top, which means the deal ends with two cells free and nothing concealed anywhere.

Tableau columns build down by exact suit and foundations build up by exact suit, so this is a game in which colour never matters at all. A cell holds one card of any kind. An empty column takes a king, or a same-suit run led by a king.

Runs move as a unit, but only as far as your spare room allows — the same capacity rule FreeCell uses. Free cells add to what you can shift; empty columns double it.

The number to keep in your head

How many cards you can move

Moving a run is shorthand for parking cards somewhere and putting them back, so the size of run you can shift is set by your free space: (free cells + 1) × 2 to the power of empty columns.

Find the row for two free cells: that is where every Seahaven deal begins, and it means three cards. Fill both cells and you are on the top row, moving one card at a time — which in a suit-strict game usually means moving nothing at all.

Towers and columns

Why so few Seahaven moves are legal

Spending two free towers

Seahaven Towers strategy

Place the two dealt cell cards early. They are your capacity, sitting idle. Until they have homes you are playing a harder game than the one you were given, and finding somewhere for them should shape your first several moves.

Go after the kings. An empty column doubles your capacity and only a king can open one, so which kings are near the top of a column is the single most useful thing to know about the board. Plan the route to one before you plan anything else.

Build suited runs downward from where they will stay. Assembling a run is slow when only one suit fits; assembling it in a column you will later have to empty is slower still. Put the run where it covers something you are content to leave buried.

Send aces and twos up as they appear. With suit-strict packing they are nearly useless in the tableau and they clog columns badly. Past the low cards, weigh each foundation move — nothing comes back down.

Three ways a tower deal closes

Where Seahaven deals are lost

Spending both cells in the opening

Two free cells is capacity three. Fill them and capacity drops to one, which in a same-suit game usually means nothing at all moves. The first few moves of a Seahaven deal should be about emptying cells, not filling them.

Building a long suited run in the wrong column

A ten-card run of hearts is only useful if it can eventually travel, and moving ten cards needs capacity ten — four free cells and an empty column. Build long runs where they already sit on top of what you want them to cover, not where you will have to shift them later.

Clearing a column with no king in sight

Columns of five are shallow enough that emptying one looks achievable, and a space doubles your capacity. But it takes a king, and with suit-strict building a buried king may as well not exist. Confirm one is reachable first.

Seahaven's tight odds

Is Seahaven Towers winnable?

A reasonable share of deals, but this is the hardest of the open-cell games on the site. Two free cells, kings-only spaces and same-suit packing compound into an opening with very little slack, and a wrong move in the first ten can end the deal before it has really begun.

Because everything is visible, a lost deal is almost always recoverable in principle if you undo far enough — which makes it a good game for learning. We do not publish a figure, since Seahaven versions differ on cell count and on whether spaces are king-restricted.

Against the other cell games

Seahaven among the open-cell games

Eight Off is the closest relative — the same suit-strict, kings-only combination — but it hands you four free cells instead of two and then removes sequence moves entirely. Which of the two is harder depends on whether you would rather have room or shortcuts.