Queen's Audience

Full rules

1. Overview
2. The parts of the layout
3. Setup
4. Playing
5. Winning
6. Tips for beginners
7. Variants

Overview

Queen's Audience is a short, simple patience (a card game for one player, also called solitaire) with a courtly picture. Sixteen cards form a square – the antechamber, where the court waits. Inside the square is the audience chamber. Kings and Queens enter it in pairs, and each Jack leads his whole suit in after him, from the 10 down to the 2. When every card has been received, you have won.

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

The parts of the layout

• Antechamber: 16 cards face up in a hollow square, four cards on each side. This is the reserve: every one of these cards is available (free to be played) at any time.
• Audience chamber: the empty space inside the square. The cards that are finished with go here: the four King–Queen pairs and the four foundations (the piles on which you collect the cards).
• Stock: the rest of the deck, face down.
• Waste pile: a face-up pile next to the stock for cards you turn over and can't use yet. Only its top card is available.

Setup

Shuffle the deck and deal 16 cards face up in a square, four on each side, with enough room in the middle for eight cards. Put the remaining 36 cards face down beside it as the stock.

Playing

There are no turns – you make every move you can, in any order, and turn a new card only when you are stuck.

1. King and Queen: whenever the King and the Queen of the same suit are both available, put them together into the audience chamber, the Queen on top of the King. They stay there for the rest of the game.
2. Jack and Ace: whenever the Jack and the Ace of the same suit are both available, put them into the audience chamber, the Jack on top of the Ace. This Jack is now a foundation. The Ace is simply done with.
3. Building down: on a Jack in the audience chamber you build its suit downwards: the 10 of that suit, then the 9, and so on down to the 2. Only available cards may be played.
4. Filling gaps: a gap in the antechamber is filled at once with the top card of the waste pile. Only if the waste pile is empty does the gap take the top card of the stock instead.
5. Stuck: turn the top card of the stock face up onto the waste pile. If it fits somewhere, play it; otherwise it stays on the waste pile.

Cards in the antechamber are never put on each other – they can only go into the audience chamber.

Example: In the deal above, the K♥ and the Q♥ are both there, so they go into the audience chamber together. The J♠ and the A♠ are there too: the J♠ goes on the A♠ as the first foundation, and the 10♠ follows at once. That leaves five gaps; the waste pile is still empty, so fill them from the stock. The J♦ has to wait until the A♦ appears, the Q♦ until the K♦ appears.

Winning

There is only one pass through the stock – no redeal. You win when all 52 cards are in the audience chamber: four King–Queen pairs and four Jacks, each with its suit from 10 down to 2 on top. If the stock is used up and nothing more fits, the game is lost. Old books promise a win in 3 games out of 4; Mark Masten's computer analysis of ten billion deals found only about 29%.

Tips for beginners

• There are hardly any decisions: play every card as soon as it fits. Each card that leaves the antechamber opens a gap, and each gap brings a card back from the waste pile.
• Before you turn the next card, check the whole square and the top of the waste pile – a matching pair is easy to miss.
• The usual way to lose: an Ace is buried deep in the waste pile while its Jack waits in the antechamber, so that whole suit is stuck.
• Because luck decides almost everything, it is a good game for relaxing – or for showing children how foundations work.

Variants

All of these are optional – choose one before you start.

• King's Audience: the King goes on top of the Queen instead. It makes no difference to play; Morehead and Mott-Smith use this name.
• Round chamber: William Brisbane Dick (1883) placed the pairs in a circle – hearts at the top, diamonds at the bottom, spades on the left, clubs on the right, with the Jacks in between.
• One redeal: when the stock is used up, turn the waste pile over without shuffling and deal through it once more. Much easier – according to Masten, about 81% of games then come out.