Basic rules of Solitaire

Solitaire can be as straight forward or as sophisticated as you make it. However, if you want a relaxing experience it’s best to understand the basic rules and to stick with those basics. Here’s a summary of the basic solitaire techniques that will improve your possibilities of winning, while keeping the game to simple and easy to play.

Highest to Lowest and Opposite Suits

The core rules of the game are to place the cards in descending sequential order while alternating colors while attempting to reveal all the cards that are face down. Once you grasp this concept, you can easily manipulate your cards around to where you need them in order to reveal the face down cards and raise your potential of winning the game.

Take from the Biggest Piles

Whenever you can, remove cards from the largest pile of face down cards and spread them throughout the other columns of cards. Most of your additional cards that need to be revealed are in that column and it’s most beneficial to work from that column first whenever possible. When you have a few different options to pick from, just keep in mind that most often it is best to work from the largest one first.

When moving the cards to the Discard Piles, keep an eye on what you have discarded.  Try not to place a card on the Discard Piles that you might need later to play a card from the Draw Pile.  Keeping them fairly even in number is often a successful technique.

You can try out these new techniques at playtournamentgames.com, in their free online game Solitaire Showdown.