Pyramid Solitaire
Pyramid deals twenty-eight cards into a seven-row wall and asks you to take it apart with arithmetic: any two exposed cards adding to thirteen come off together, and Kings leave on their own. Uncovering the row above means clearing both cards below it, so the order you pair in matters far more than the pairs themselves. Short, sharp games — a good one takes a couple of minutes.
- Players
- 1
- Playing time
- 10 min
- Ages
- 8 to adult
- Redeals
- Two
How it's played
Twenty-eight cards in a wall, and two cards come off together whenever they add up to thirteen. The arithmetic is the easy part.
A card can only be taken when nothing overlaps it — and every card is overlapped by two. So the pyramid comes apart from the bottom, and the order you pair in decides the game.
one card in row threethe 14 cards holding it down
Every position has a number: how many cards have to leave before it can.
Which means the card at the top of the pyramid is behind every other card in it, without exception. It always comes off last. Plan backwards from there.
Where the other twenty-four cards live
The pyramid
Seven rows, one card at the top and seven along the bottom. This is the only pile you have to clear.
The stock
Turned one at a time. Nothing in it is visible until you get there.
The waste
Only the card on top can be paired, with a pyramid card or with a King on its own. Bury it and it is gone until the next pass.
Everything adds to thirteen
Ace is one, the numbers are themselves, Jack is eleven and Queen is twelve. There are only seven ways off the board and this is all of them.
Suits never matter and colors never matter. A King is thirteen by itself, so it leaves on its own — which makes a King the only card in the deck that can never be stuck for a partner.
You never have to empty the stock.
The game is won the moment the twenty-eight are gone. What is left in the stock and the waste is not counted, not looked at, and does not matter — a pile of unplayed cards sitting next to a cleared pyramid is a clean win.
Twenty-four cards, turned one at a time, and two redeals. You see the stock three times and then it is finished — so a card you skipped past is a card you have to come all the way round for.
Lost is quieter than won: no pair available, no King showing, no redeal left, and that is that. Plenty of deals cannot be beaten at all, which is why a game takes two minutes rather than twenty.
Undo goes back as far as you want, so the honest way to play it is to take the pyramid apart, see where it jams, and walk back to the pair that did it.
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.