Baker's Dozen Solitaire

Deal the pack face up into thirteen columns of four — a baker's dozen — and move every King to the bottom of its column. Only the top card of a column is free, and only one card moves at a time. It can go up to its foundation, which starts with the Ace and climbs in suit to the King, or onto the top card of another column that is exactly one rank higher, of any suit.

A column that empties stays empty for the rest of the game: nothing may ever be put there. All 52 cards on the foundations wins. The thirteen columns sit in two rows here, seven above six, so a phone can show every card at a readable size.

Because a King can never move except up to its foundation. Nothing ranks above it, so it cannot be built on anything, and empty columns cannot be refilled. A King dealt on top of three cards would bury them until its whole suit was banked — which would usually need one of the cards beneath it. Put at the bottom, the King is harmless: it just becomes the foot of a column that everything else can build down onto.

Most of the time, if you plan. A computer search of the first hundred deals on this page finds a win for 66 of them and proves just one impossible; the rest it could not settle in its time limit, so 66 is a floor, not a ceiling. Nothing is hidden and nothing is dealt later: when a winnable deal is lost, every move that lost it is there on the table.

The build ignores suit, which makes landing spots easy to find — up to four cards of the right rank at once. The discipline is elsewhere: no free cells, no empty columns to use, and a card you cover stays covered until everything on it has somewhere to go. Forty Thieves is the harder cousin; FreeCell the roomier one.