Fortune's Favour

Full rules

1. Overview
2. Terms
3. Setup
4. Playing
5. Winning
6. Tips for beginners
7. Variants

Overview

Fortune's Favour is a short, friendly patience (a card game for one player, also called solitaire). You sort the whole deck onto four piles, one for each suit, from Ace up to King. Twelve face-up cards help you: you can park cards on them, and every gap is refilled at once. With a little care the game comes out almost every time – hence the name, "fortune favours" the player. It is a good first patience for children who already know the order of the cards, and a gentle step towards bigger games like Forty Thieves.

• Players: 1
• You need: one standard 52-card deck, no jokers.
• Time: about 5 minutes per game.

Terms

• Rank order: A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K. The Ace is low.
• Foundations: four piles, one per suit, each started by its Ace and built up in suit – the 2 of the same suit on the Ace, then the 3 and so on up to the King.
• Tableau: the twelve piles below the foundations. Only the top card of each pile can be moved.
• Build down in suit: in the tableau, put a card onto a card of the same suit that is exactly one rank higher – 7♥ onto 8♥.
• Stock: the face-down rest of the deck. Waste: the face-up pile onto which you turn stock cards; only its top card can be played.

Setup

1. Take the four Aces out of the deck and lay them in a row. They are the foundations.
2. Shuffle the other 48 cards and deal twelve cards face up in two rows of six below the Aces. Each card starts a tableau pile.
3. Put the remaining 36 cards face down as the stock. Leave room for the waste next to it.

Playing

There are no turns – you make one move after another, in any order you like:

1. To a foundation: move the top card of any tableau pile, or the top card of the waste, onto its foundation if it is the next card of that suit.
2. Onto the tableau: move the top card of a tableau pile, or the top card of the waste, onto the top card of a tableau pile if it is of the same suit and one rank lower. Only one card at a time may be moved.
3. Filling spaces: when a tableau pile is emptied, fill the space at once with the top card of the waste – or, if the waste is empty, with the top card of the stock.
4. Stock: when you can't or don't want to move anything, turn the top card of the stock face up. Play it to a foundation or the tableau if you like; otherwise it goes on the waste.

You go through the stock only once – there is no redeal.

Example: In the layout above, move the 2♦ and the 2♣ onto their Aces. That leaves two spaces, and the waste is still empty, so fill both from the stock – say with a 6♣ and a 3♦. The 3♦ goes straight onto the 2♦ (and its space is filled from the stock again), and the 5♣ can move onto the 6♣, making yet another space.

Winning

You win when all 52 cards lie on the four foundations, each topped by its King. If the stock is used up and no move is left, the game is lost. Morehead and Mott-Smith put the chance at nine games in ten; a computer that knows the order of the stock wins practically every deal.

Tips for beginners

• Before turning a stock card, make every useful move in the tableau and to the foundations.
• The waste is the danger: a card buried there comes back only when it reaches the top. Spaces are filled from the waste first, so making a space is the way to rescue its top card.
• Build down in suit to gather cards into one pile: every pile you empty brings a new card into the tableau.
• When you can choose between two moves, prefer the one that empties a pile.

Variants

All optional – agree before you start.

• One redeal: when the stock is used up, turn the waste over and go through it once more. The oldest descriptions (1892 and 1898) allow this.
• Busy Aces: the two-deck big brother. Shuffle two decks together, deal twelve cards and leave the Aces in the deck: they start the eight foundations as they turn up. A space may be filled with any top card or the top of the waste, whenever you like. Much harder – see Forty Thieves for the full rules of this family.