Double Solitaire
Double Solitaire takes Klondike and points two players at the same foundations. You each get your own tableau and draw pile, there are no turns, and the centre piles are shared — so the moment an Ace lands, the race is on to be the one who plays the two. It rewards speed and nerve rather than patience, and a session is a genuinely competitive card game rather than a quiet solo one.
- Players
- 2
- Playing time
- 15 min
- Ages
- 8 to adult
- Turns
- None
How it's played
You each play your own game of solitaire. You just do it into the same middle, at the same time, with no turns and no waiting.
Two decks, two tableaux, one middle. Everything on your side is yours alone. Everything in the middle belongs to whoever gets there first.
Your own tableau and your own stock. Nobody else may touch a card on your side, and you build it down in alternating colors exactly as you would playing alone.
you laid itthey did
Eight foundations, because there are two decks and so eight aces. An empty one takes any ace and is that suit from then on, and either of you may play to any of them.
Theirs works the same way and is equally off limits to you. You are not playing against their tableau — you are racing them to the middle.
Everything else you already know
- Your columns build down, alternating colors. Black six onto red seven. Runs of face-up cards move as a block.
- The middle builds up by suit. Ace, then two, then three, regardless of which of you supplies them. Each suit ends up with two piles once both of its aces have turned up.
- An empty column still only takes a king. That rule does not soften because somebody is racing you.
- You may take a card back off the middle. It goes back to your tableau and your count goes down by one. Sometimes that is worth it to free a column.
- Stuck is not a turn ending. Turn a card from your stock and keep going. Nothing about being stuck stops the other player.
There are no turns.
Nobody waits for anybody. Both of you are playing the entire time, and two decks are on the table — so you can both be holding the same card.
An ace of hearts goes down on an open place. That pile is hearts now, and it wants a two.
You both have a two of hearts face up. Two decks are in play, so both of them are real.
They are half a second faster, and theirs lands. That pile wants a three now.
Yours is stuck until the other ace of hearts surfaces and opens a second heart pile — and you do not control when that happens.
your cardtheirs
Speed and nerve, then, rather than patience. It is the same puzzle you know with somebody else's hand already in it.
Two ways it can end
There is an outright win and there is a count, and they are not the same ending.
You get rid of every card on your side
Tableau empty, stock empty, waste empty. That wins it on the spot, whatever the count says.
Neither of you can move
You both say so, the game stops where it stands, and whoever put more cards into the middle takes it.
places in the middle, ever — eight foundations of thirteen, two decks' worth. That is the whole prize, and it is one prize, not two. Every card you land is one they cannot.
Thirty to twenty-nine, with forty-five places neither of you got to — including one whole pile whose ace never surfaced. Illustrative.
If the room liked this
Classic Klondike Solitaire - host plays while others watch in real-time!
Tame eight legs of cards by building complete suit sequences from King to Ace.
Nothing is face down and almost every deal can be won. Four free cells hold cards aside while you unstack eight columns.