Play Bastion Solitaire — Two Cells, and Both of Them Are Already Occupied

Bastion deals fifty cards face up into ten columns of five and then puts the last two cards straight into its two free cells. That is the whole joke of the opening: the game hands you its storage and spends it in the same breath. Before you may park anything, you have to place something. The tableau builds up or down by one in the same suit, one card at a time, and an empty column takes any card. Foundations run up in suit from the Aces, which are buried in the deal. Nothing is hidden, there is no stock and there is no redeal — every card you will ever see is on the table when play begins. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Bastion?

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

Setup

• Tableau: ten columns, face up, five cards each (50 cards).
• Free cells: two, and each holds one card of the deal from the start.
• Foundations: four empty piles. The Aces start buried in the columns.
• No stock, no waste, no redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns up or down by one in the same suit. On the 7 of clubs you may place either the 6 or the 8 of clubs, and nothing else.
• The sequence does not wrap. A King is the top of a run and an Ace is the bottom, so no Ace ever goes onto a King in the tableau.
• Move one card at a time. Packed runs never travel together, however tidy they look.
• Each free cell holds exactly one card. Its card may go back to the tableau or up to a foundation whenever a legal home exists.
• An empty column accepts any card.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way. Cards banked there stay there.
• You win when all 52 cards sit on the foundations.

Bastion Strategy

The two-way build is generous and the two full cells are not. Almost every Bastion game turns on how quickly you convert that second fact.

• Empty a cell in your first few moves. Both cells start loaded, so you begin with zero working room. Look for a column top that will host one of the two cell cards — same suit, one rank away — and play it there before you plan anything else. Until a cell is free, you cannot lift a blocker at all.
• Read every column top as two ranks, not one. Building up or down means the 7 of clubs wants the 6 or the 8 of clubs. Ten tops therefore offer up to twenty landing ranks, but only in the suits they happen to be. Scan by suit first, then by rank; the pair that helps is usually one you missed.
• Dig for the shallowest Ace, then keep digging past it. Nothing banks until an Ace surfaces, and with columns only five deep the cover is rarely more than four cards. Count the cover on each Ace before you spend a cell, and prefer the Ace whose blockers have visible homes elsewhere.
• Do not bank a low card you still need as a host. Because the tableau builds both ways, a 2 left in play can host a 3 as easily as an Ace can host a 2. Foundations are one-way: a card sent up never comes back. Send it when the suit needs it, not the moment it becomes legal.
• An empty column is worth more than both cells. A space takes any card and can then be built on in either direction, which makes it a real staging area rather than a one-card dead end. Ten columns of five gives you a genuine chance of clearing one; take it when it appears.

Bastion in the Open-Tableau Family

Bastion sits in the corner of solitaire where every card is face up from the first move and the whole game is a question of order. Its relatives on this board are the castle games — Beleaguered Castle, Streets and Alleys, Fortress — and its storage comes from the FreeCell side of the family. What Bastion contributes of its own is the pre-loaded reserve: the deal itself decides the first problem you must solve.

The PySol Fan Club collection implements it as a game of ten rows and two reserves, dealing three rows, then two more rows, then a final row to the reserves, and building the tableau up or down in suit with single-card moves. Its own descendant in that collection is Ten by One, which keeps the building rule exactly and changes only the board: ten columns again, but one cell instead of two, left empty, with the two spare cards pushed into the columns. The two games look almost identical written down and feel nothing alike to play, which is the most useful thing about having both.

For the same two-way in-suit build without any cells at all, play Fortress; for four cells and an alternating-colour build, play FreeCell; for four cells and a strict same-suit build, play Baker's Game.

One honest note on difficulty. Win-rate figures circulate for Bastion, but the ones we can find quote no method and no sample size, so this page does not repeat them. What can be said without a citation is structural: two cells and a two-way build make this friendlier than the cell-less castle games, while the single-card move rule and the buried Aces keep it well short of easy.