Play Fortune's Favor Solitaire — the Aces Are Already Up, and the Spaces Are Not Yours
Fortune's Favor gives you a head start and then quietly takes something back. The four Aces are lifted onto the foundations before a card is dealt, so the long dig that opens most one-deck games simply does not happen here. What you get instead is a board of twelve single cards and a stock of thirty-six, and one rule that changes how you think about every move: an empty pile is filled at once from the waste. You never choose what goes there. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
How Do You Play Fortune's Favor?
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.
- Tableau: twelve piles of a single card, face up.
- Stock: the remaining 36 cards, turned one at a time to a waste. No redeal.
Rules
- Build tableau piles down by suit: the 7 of hearts goes on the 8 of hearts, and on nothing else.
- Move one card at a time. Packed sequences never travel together.
- An empty pile is filled immediately from the waste — or, when the waste is bare, from the next card off the stock. The choice is not yours.
- Once the stock and the waste are both spent, the fill can no longer happen and an empty pile becomes an ordinary space that takes any card.
- Foundations build up by suit from the Ace. Cards banked there stay there.
- One pass through the stock. There is no redeal, and no second chance at a card you passed over.
Fortune's Favor Strategy
The name promises luck and the game does hand you a lot of it. What skill there is lives in two places: the order you empty piles in, and the twos.
- Watch the waste before you empty a pile. The card on top of the waste is the card that will land in the space. If it is a King you will never build on, emptying a pile right now costs you a working position; if it is a low card of a suit you are digging, the same move is a gift. This is the one real decision in the game, and it repeats all through it.
- Bank the twos early, but not the rest. With the Aces already up, every 2 is playable the moment you see it and there is no reason to hold one — nothing in the tableau can build on an Ace. Higher cards are different: a 6 left in play can host a 5, and a foundation is one-way.
- Spread the twelve piles across the ranks. The build ignores nothing but suit, so a pile is useful in proportion to how likely the next card is to fit it. Twelve tops at twelve different ranks and a good spread of suits give the waste somewhere to go; four tops all showing Kings do not.
- Count what is left of the stock. Thirty-six cards go past you exactly once. Late in the pass, a card you cannot place is gone for good, so the last dozen turns are where a won game is usually lost.
- Play for the endgame space. Once the stock and the waste are gone the fill stops firing, and any pile you clear after that is a genuine free space you can use as you like. Games that look dead often have one more move in them for exactly this reason.
Fortune's Favor in the Forty Thieves Family
Fortune's Favor is catalogued in the Forty Thieves group even though it uses a single deck. The family markers are all here: equal columns dealt face up, foundations built up in suit, single-card moves, and a stock turned one card at a time with no redeal. Morehead and Mott-Smith describe it with the Aces removed to start the foundations and twelve cards laid out in two rows of six — and add that any preferred arrangement of the twelve will do, which is why this catalogue lays them in one row.
The forced fill is the game's signature, and the books state it as a compulsion rather than a permission: spaces "are filled from the wastepile or, if there is none, the stock". The PySol Fan Club collection implements exactly that, and it is the same rule that defines Corona — the two-deck game whose only difference from Limited is this one line. Playing Fortune's Favor and Corona in turn is the clearest way to feel what the rule does to a game.
Its nearest relative by shape is Busy Aces, which also deals twelve piles of one card — but with two decks, the Aces buried, and spaces that are yours to fill. The other one-deck member of this family is Ali Baba, which keeps the pre-founded Aces and gives you a much deeper board.
One honest note on difficulty. The game is usually described as easy, and one source puts the odds at nine in ten. No figure we can find comes with a method or a sample size, so this page does not quote one as fact. What is certain is structural: four foundations that already hold their Aces, plus a stock that does the work of filling spaces for you, make this among the gentlest games in the family.