This article is about the solitaire game Bowling. To know more about the sport, see the Bowling article.
Bowling solitaire was invented by Eurogame design legend Sid Sackson in the 1970s (Doctorow). Bowling is a unique and fun solitaire game using one deck of playing cards. The object of the game is to try to fill as many Pins as possible for each of the ten frames.
Bowling has ten Pin Piles. The Deck is located at the right and turns up one card at a time. There are two Ball Piles located below the Deck. The two Ball Piles can contain up to three cards each. The scoring frame is located either above or below the gameplay.
To begin playing, turn up one card at a time. The card turned up must be planted on one of the Pin Piles, or placed onto one of the Ball Piles. All the Pin Piles should be filled in order from lowest ranking cards (towards the bottom) to the highest ranking cards (towards the top right). There are only ten Pins, but there are thirteen ranks of cards. The difficult part of this game is anticipating what ranks will not be drawn from the Deck.
Here is an example of a possible arrangement (Tesseract Mobile):
9 _ Q K 5 _ 7 2 4 1
Only a ten or a Jack can be placed onto the empty Pin between the nine and Queen. Only a six can fill the empty space between the five and seven. Place multiple cards of the same rank into the same piles. If a three or an eight is drawn, they must be put in the Ball Pile because it cannot be placed with the Pins. Bowling solitaire is scored the same way regular Bowling is scored (Bowling SoliTaire!). To get a Strike, fill all the Pins before placing a card in the Ball Pile. To receive a Spare, fill all Pins before placing cards into the second Ball Pile. After both Ball Piles have been filled with three cards each, that round of the game will end. The game consists of ten rounds.