Strategy guide · Puzzle solitaire

Cruel Solitaire

Every card is face up, the redeal never shuffles, and the game is still merciless. Cruel is less a card game than a clockwork puzzle — and the players who learn its gears win far more than luck would allow.

The deal

The four Aces begin on the foundations. The remaining 48 cards are dealt face up into twelve piles of four.

The rules

• Goal: build the four foundations up in suit from Ace to King.
• Tableau building: down in suit, one card at a time. Only the top card of each pile may move.
• Worrying back: in Full Deck Solitaire, the top card of a foundation may be pulled back down to a legal tableau spot — the foundations are not one-way.
• Empty piles cannot be refilled — they simply vanish from the layout.
• The redeal: at any time, gather the piles in order — left to right, each pile picked up and stacked without shuffling — then deal the combined stack back out four cards at a time into new piles. Redeals are unlimited.
• Losing: the game ends when a redeal reproduces the exact same layout and no moves remain.

How the redeal really works

Here's the insight most players never find: because the redeal doesn't shuffle, it's completely predictable. The cards go back in the order they sit, and come out in groups of four. That means the piles only change if you've changed the count of cards ahead of them.

Play one card to a foundation, and every card after it shifts back one position in the next redeal — piles regroup into new combinations. Play exactly four, and the piles behind the gap redeal identically to before. This is the engine of the whole game: you're not just making moves, you're steering how the next deal falls.

Six ways to win more often

1. Redeal early and often. There's no penalty and no limit. If the layout offers nothing, cycle it — but always play any available foundation card first, since an unchanged layout redeals into an unchanged layout, and that's the loss condition.
2. Count in fours. Before playing cards to the tableau or foundations, ask how the removal shifts the regrouping. An "extra" tableau move you don't strictly need can be exactly the nudge that breaks a stuck cycle.
3. Use the foundations as a tool, not a vault. Full Deck Solitaire lets you worry cards back off the foundations, and expert Cruel play leans on it: park the 5♥ up top to free a pile, then retrieve it when the 6♥ needs a landing spot. Better still, pulling a card back changes the card count — which changes how the next redeal regroups. It's one more gear you can turn.
4. Watch for the deadly pairs. The classic Cruel loss is a high card of a suit sitting directly on top of a lower card of the same suit — a K♠ resting on the Q♠, say — since builds go down and the pair travels together through redeals. Break these up the moment the redeal makes it possible.
5. Work the last piles first. Cards near the end of the layout move most in each redeal, since every removal ahead of them shifts their grouping. Cards in the first pile barely move at all — problems there need tableau surgery, not cycling.
6. Use Full Deck's hint shake sparingly but honestly. If the hint system finds nothing and a redeal changes nothing, the game is over — accept it and study what buried you. Cruel teaches more in defeat than most games do in victory.

Why play it in Full Deck Solitaire

Cruel is one of those variants players discover in Full Deck Solitaire and get quietly obsessed with. Per-game statistics show your true win rate as it climbs, the three-level hint system will confirm whether a hidden move exists before you burn a redeal, and if a shuffle-adjacent bug ever slips in, this is a family studio that reads its support mail and ships fixes fast.