Patience (solitaire) Cards portal

Seven Devils

Seven Devils
A Patience game
Family Klondike-like
Deck Double 52-card
Seven Devils
Players 1
Skills required Tactics
Age range 13+
Cards 104
Deck Anglo-American
Card rank (highest to lowest) K Q J 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 A
Playing time Various
Random chance Hard

Seven Devils is arguably the most difficult of all solitaire games. It is a two-pack game widely available as a computer version.

Preparations

Two decks (104 cards) are used. Twenty-eight cards are dealt out to seven diminishing columns with the bottom card of each column face up, and a further seven cards (the "devils") are dealt face up to the right of the columns.

Play

The aim is to move all the cards into thirteen-card sequences on the goal piles (at the right of the board), ascending in sequence and following suit, starting with the aces.

Cards on the table can be stacked red-on-black in descending sequence. Any card can be used to fill an empty column.

Only one card can be moved at a time. Some variations of Seven Devils let you move several cards if there are empty columns as if the empty columns were used as temporary spots.

The seven devils in the reserve stack cannot be placed on other stacks, and can be moved only to the goal piles.

The difficulty of this game arises from four factors:

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