Forty Thieves - Cards

Play Forty Thieves Solitaire!

Forty cards, face up, in ten columns of four. You can see every one of them, and most of the time you still cannot do a thing.

Here is why. A card travels alone. Never in a run, never two at once, however neatly they happen to be stacked. It lands only on a card of its own suit, exactly one rank higher. With two decks in play that is a narrow window, and the sixty-four cards held in the stock come out one at a time onto a waste pile that is never recycled. One pass. What you turn up is what you get.

The single mercy is the empty column, which will take absolutely any card. Clearing a column is the closest thing to a lever this game offers, and a good deal of the first half is spent trying to earn one.

This is a demanding patience and it makes no secret of it. Losing is ordinary. A win is worth something precisely because the board gave you so little to work with.

The board

• Two decks, 104 cards in total
• 10 tableau columns of 4 cards, all face up
• 8 foundations, each built up by suit from Ace to King
• 64 cards in the stock, turned one at a time, no second pass
• The game is won when all 104 cards reach the foundations
• Ten points per card promoted, and five for a card taken off the waste onto a column

In the app Undo across the last hundred moves, so one wrong single-card decision does not cost you the evening. Hints. A tutorial with the rules in full. Statistics: games played, wins and best times. Card backs and table colours. Free to play, no sign-up, and it runs with no connection. 33 languages.

Contact: sbecker.app@gmail.com