Triple Deck Solitaire

Designed and contributed by Alan Gilfoy

Deck:

144 cards (3 decks, with the 12 Kings removed)

Object:

Build up 12 piles Ace to Queen.

Deal:

Shuffle the 3 decks thoroughly and deal a Standard Solitaire (AKA Klondike) deal. Then, set the leftover cards aside in one pile.

Play:

(The layout should contain 7 piles plus the pile of leftover cards.)

Move Aces from the layout to one of twelve foundations (Twelve spaces above the layout). Then play twos on top of the Aces, threes on top of the twos, and so on (building up). (Suits do not matter).

This means that if there is a Queen faceup in the layout, you may put a Jack on it. You may move a 10 on top of a Jack, et cetera et cetera. Again, suits do not matter. You may build ladders that are more than 2 cards long by continuing to add lower cards.

You sometimes get empty spaces in your row of layout piles via moving cards. You may move Queens into empty spaces in the layout. If a ladder has a Queen on top, it may be moved into an empty space.

You sometimes expose the facedown cards through moving cards around. Flip over these exposed facedown cards.

You may move entire ladders or partial ladders.

If you cannot play, take your stockpile (the pile of leftover cards you had after you dealt) and flip over 3 cards from this into another pile. You may play the top card of this new pile by moving it to the layout or the foundations.

Scoring:

Look at the 12 foundations and follow this chart:

Pile built up to Ace	- -	1 point
Pile built up to 2	- -	3 points
Pile built up to 3	- -	6 points
Pile built up to 4	- -	10 points
Pile built up to 5	- -	15 points
Pile built up to 6	- -	21 points
Pile built up to 7	- -	28 points
Pile built up to 8	- -	36 points
Pile built up to 9	- -	45 points
Pile built up to 10	- -	55 points
Pile built up to Jack	- -	66 points
Pile built up to Queen	- -	78 points

Your score is the combined score of the 12 foundations.

Variation:

Play with the 12 Kings. Kings and ladders containing them are moved into empty piles. A foundation pile built up to King is worth 91 points.