Spanish Patience

Down by rank, any suit

How to play Spanish Patience

The whole deck is dealt into thirteen columns of four, face up. Before play starts, any king sitting in a column is quietly slid to the bottom of it — a rule inherited from Baker's Dozen, and a merciful one, since a king can never be packed onto anything and would otherwise block its column forever.

Only the top card of each column can move, which gives you thirteen candidates at any moment. Tableau building ignores suit completely: any 6 goes onto any 7. Foundations are the opposite, strictly by suit from ace to king, and getting all fifty-two cards up there wins the game.

There is no stock and nothing hidden. Every card that will ever be in play is in front of you from the first move, which makes this a puzzle rather than a gamble — and means a lost deal is usually traceable to a specific decision.

Rank alone decides

Building when suit does not matter

Using the spaces

Spanish Patience strategy

Find the aces first. Everything is visible, so you can see exactly how deep each ace is buried before you make a single move. Those four cards are the only way the foundations start, and the shallowest one is almost always the right first target.

Empty the shortest column you can. With four cards per column and only top cards moving, clearing a column is a four-move project at best — so pick the one whose cards have obvious homes elsewhere, not the one that looks most tempting.

Keep columns short rather than tidy. Depth is the enemy in any game where sequences do not move: a column of eight is eight separate problems, and the neat run inside it helps nobody. Given a choice between two legal placements, prefer the one that flattens the board.

Do not rush the foundations past the low cards. Aces and twos always go up, but a 6 sent up early is a 5 with nowhere to land, and here there is no stock to produce an alternative. Check what the tableau still wants before committing anything above about a 4.

Three ways the freedom runs out

Where Spanish Patience deals go wrong

Spending a space to make a move you did not need

Because any card fills an empty column, the temptation is to use a space the moment it appears. A space is worth more than almost any single move: it is the only way to lift a card that has nowhere else to go. Ask what you are trying to free before you fill it.

Stacking onto a column that hides an ace

Everything is visible from the first move, so there is no excuse for burying a low card — and yet the rank-only building rule makes it very easy. Before packing a 6 onto a 7, look at what is under that 7.

Building long descending piles

A tidy 9-8-7-6 looks like progress and is four separate moves to dismantle, each needing its own destination. Since sequences never travel together here, depth is pure cost. Keep columns short.

Spanish Patience odds

Is Spanish Patience winnable?

Considerably more often than Baker's Dozen, and that is the entire reason the variant exists. Being able to use an empty column turns positions that would be terminal into merely awkward ones, and because nothing is hidden a careful player can usually see the route.

It is not a soft game. Cards move one at a time, sequences never travel, and thirteen columns of four means there is very little slack anywhere. Most losses here are genuinely losses rather than bad shuffles, which some players like and others find unforgiving.

We do not publish a figure. Published numbers for this family almost always describe Baker's Dozen with dead spaces, which is a different and much harder game.

Against Baker's Dozen

One rule apart from Baker's Dozen

These four games are all fully visible builders with no hidden cards. What separates them is what a space is worth.

The Baker's Dozen row is worth staring at: the two games are identical apart from a single word in the space rule, and that word is the difference between a game most players lose most of the time and one they can reasonably expect to solve.