Pyramid Solitaire

Remove all 28 cards of the pyramid. With the whole-deck option, all 52 cards must be removed, including the stock and the waste. By default the game is won as soon as the pyramid is cleared, even with cards still in the stock or the waste. With the whole-deck option it is won only when all 52 cards are gone. The game is over without a win when no pair or King can be removed and no pass is left. It also ends as soon as no card still to come from the stock or the waste can ever pair with a free card, so you are never left drawing through cards that cannot help. The game then tells you why it is over.

Shuffle one pack of 52 cards and deal 28 of them face up in seven rows: one card at the top, two in the next row, and so on down to seven cards in the bottom row. Each card lies partly on the two cards above it. The other 24 cards form the stock; its top card is turned face up. The waste pile starts empty.

Look at what a pair uncovers. Taking a bottom-row card can free one card above it or two, and the cards higher up are the hardest to reach. A card can never pair with a card it lies on: the lower card is not free until the upper one is gone. Plan another partner for both of them. Count the partners. There are four cards of each value, so before you use the last 6 that is free, check that the 7s still in the pyramid have another way out.

One pass: you go through the stock only once, with no redeal. Offered here as a setup option. Two passes: one redeal of the waste. Offered here as a setup option. Whole deck: the game counts as won only when every card of the pack is removed, not just the pyramid. Some rule books treat this as the standard game and call the pyramid-only goal Relaxed Pyramid. Offered here as a setup option. Par Pyramid: three deals through the stock, with points for clearing the pyramid on each deal and penalties for cards left over. Related games: Tri Peaks and Golf also clear a layout card by card instead of building piles.

The name Pyramid first belonged to a different patience, with fifteen cards laid out in a triangle that did not overlap. The game of pairs that make thirteen appears to be American. Dean Bryden's Fun With Cards (1927) may be its first appearance, as Elizabeth's Solitaire, and Johnson and Pope's 30 Games of Solitaire (1928) may be the first book to call it Pyramid. Books of the following years also called it the Tower of Twenty-Eight and disagreed on whether the waste could be dealt again and whether the stock had to be cleared too. Albert H. Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith's The Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games (1949) helped make it part of the standard repertoire of patience games and added Par Pyramid, with the waste dealt again twice.