Trefoil Solitaire

Aces out, then deal

How to play Trefoil Solitaire

Pull the four aces and set them out as the foundations. Deal the remaining forty-eight cards face up in sixteen overlapping fans of three, so that the last card dealt to each fan sits on top. The name is the three-leaf shape those fans make.

Only the top card of a fan can move. It goes either up to its foundation, if that foundation is showing the rank below it, or across on to another fan's top card of the same suit one rank higher. Cards move singly, and a fan that empties is finished: nothing can be played into the gap.

Because the aces are already placed, every two is playable the moment it is exposed. That is the practical difference from the parent game, and the first thing to do with a new deal is look for the twos and count how many are on top.

What four cards change

Why the missing aces matter more than they look

In La Belle Lucie an ace is the worst card to find in a fan. Nothing can be built on it, so it is never a target, and if it lands at the bottom of a fan its whole suit waits until the two cards above it find homes elsewhere. A deal with two aces buried that way is close to lost before the first move. Trefoil deletes that failure mode outright.

The price is two fans. Sixteen live cards instead of eighteen, and sixteen possible landing squares instead of eighteen, in a game where landing squares are the scarce resource. The trade still comes out in the player's favour, because the four cards removed were the four that could never be landed on anyway.

The twos inherit the aces' old role, with one difference. An ace in a fan had to wait for a space on the foundation row; a two never waits, because its foundation is already open. Nor can a two be a target, since the only card that could sit on it is gone. So a two is never worth keeping on the table, and moving one up is the only move in the game with no downside at all.

The order to take them in

Which move to make when several are open

Most Trefoil positions offer a handful of legal moves, and they are rarely equal. The question to ask of each one is what it uncovers, because the uncovered card is the only thing a move can gain you.

Reading the threes

Trefoil Solitaire strategy

Start by finding all four twos and all four threes, and noting how deep each one lies. A two on top plays at once. A two in the middle of a fan needs one card moved off it, and the card on top of it is the one to plan around. A two at the bottom of a fan is the nearest thing Trefoil has to a buried ace, and the deal's difficulty is mostly a count of how many of those there are.

A three is a target for exactly one card, its own two, and that two would always rather go up. So an exposed three is dead ground until its two is on the foundation, at which point the three follows and the fan beneath it opens. The same logic runs up the ranks: a card is a useful target only while the card below it in suit still has somewhere better to be than the foundation, which is to say, never for long.

That is why fan moves in Trefoil are mostly about digging, not building. A long same-suit run on a fan is not an asset the way it is in Klondike; it is a stack that will have to be unpicked one card at a time on to the foundation later, and every card in it is covering the card underneath. Move a card across only when the card it uncovers is worth more than the target you are burying.

Spend the reshuffles late. A shuffle of forty cards is nearly a fresh deal and fixes nothing in particular. A shuffle of fifteen, with the low ranks already banked, is far more likely to put the one card you need on top of a fan. Exhaust the position first, including moves that look pointless, then reshuffle.

Easier, not easy

Is Trefoil Solitaire winnable?

More often than La Belle Lucie, for the reasons above: no ace can be buried, and every two is an exit the moment it surfaces. It is still a fan game with no group moves and no use for an empty space, and a deal that buries three twos at the bottom of their fans will usually beat you regardless. The two reshuffles are what keep it honest, and how well you time them is most of the skill involved. We do not publish a win rate, because none has been measured against this exact ruleset.

The fan family

Trefoil beside its relatives

Every game in this table deals the whole deck face up and gives you no stock. What varies is where the aces begin, how the fans build, and what rescues you when the moves run out.

Cruel is the closest cousin outside the fan games proper: it also lifts the aces out first and builds down in suit, but its piles hold four cards and its redeal keeps the cards in order instead of shuffling them.