Play Acme Solitaire — Canfield With the Guesswork Removed

Every game of Canfield begins with a card nobody chose: one is turned, and its rank becomes the base for all four foundations, so the whole arithmetic of the board is decided before you touch anything. Acme takes that away. The four Aces are lifted to the foundations before the deal, everything builds in suit, and nothing wraps past the King. What is left is a small, tight, entirely knowable puzzle: thirteen cards in a reserve, four single cards on the board, and thirty-one to come one at a time. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Acme?

Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck.
• Foundations: four, and each already holds its Ace before the deal.
• Reserve: thirteen cards, of which only the top one is in play.
• Tableau: four columns of a single card each.
• Stock: the remaining 31 cards, turned one at a time to a waste, with one redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns down by suit: the 7 of hearts onto the 8 of hearts, and nothing else.
• Move one card at a time. A packed run never travels as a unit.
• Nothing wraps. A King is the top of a run and an Ace is the bottom, both in the tableau and on the foundations.
• An emptied column is refilled at once from the reserve — a space is not yours while the reserve still holds cards.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• One card off the stock at a time, and exactly one redeal.

Acme Strategy

Four columns is very little room, and a strict suit build makes every one of them a specific request rather than a general one.

• Empty the reserve, and treat that as the game. Thirteen cards, one at a time, and every column you clear immediately swallows another one. Getting through the reserve is not a side task — it is how the board opens up, and a game where the reserve stalls is a game already lost.
• Read each column top as one exact card. The 9 of clubs accepts the 8 of clubs and nothing else in the deck. With four columns you have at most four requests outstanding, so keep them spread across suits and ranks rather than doubling up.
• Bank freely — the foundations are the point. Because the tableau builds in suit and cannot wrap, a card kept in play only helps if the exact next card of its own suit appears. That is a long shot with four columns, so sending cards up costs you less here than in most of the family.
• Do not fight for a space. An empty column is filled from the reserve before you can use it, which is Canfield's rule and it applies here in full. Clearing a column is worth doing because it advances the reserve, not because it gives you somewhere to put things.
• Spend the redeal knowing the order. Thirty-one cards come past once, then once more. Use the first pass to learn which suits you can realistically finish, and the second to finish them.

Acme in the Canfield Family

Acme is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Canfield variant, and its class is a short list of removals. The alternating-colour tableau becomes a same-suit one with a single-card move allowance. The turned base card is replaced by a shuffle hook that moves all four Aces to the top of the talon and deals them straight to the foundations. And because the foundations start at the Ace by default, the wrap that Canfield needs — a foundation beginning at a 7 has to run past the King back round to the 6 — is simply not there any more.

That last consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to miss. The wrap in this family is not a decoration; it exists because the base rank is random. Fix the base at the Ace and the wrap has nothing to do, so it goes. Acme is the clean demonstration of that: change one thing about how the game starts, and a second rule disappears on its own.

Its closest relative in this catalogue is Storehouse, which fixes its base at the twos by exactly the same mechanism — all four cards of the rank lifted out before the deal — but keeps alternating-colour building and gets two redeals. Playing the two together shows how much the base rank alone is worth.

For the family's own rule, with a turned base card and everything that follows from it, play Canfield or Eagle Wing. For the loosest build in the family, Chameleon. For a Canfield-family board with hidden rows and no auto-refill at all, Minerva.

One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Acme balanced, and no published win rate for it that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally it is more predictable than Canfield and not obviously easier: you always know what you are building towards, but four columns and a strict suit rule give you very little room to get there.