Ali Baba is what Forty Thieves becomes when you take away one deck, hand the player the four Aces, and let sequences move as a unit. Ten columns of four cards sit face up, the Aces are already on their foundations, and the stock holds only eight cards. Almost everything is visible and almost everything is legal, which makes this one of the friendliest doors into a family with a reputation for being merciless. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.
With only eight cards in the stock, this game is almost entirely a tableau game. Nearly every decision you make is about the forty cards already in front of you.
The name is the joke, and the joke is accurate. Forty Thieves is the two-deck standard of this family; Ali Baba is its one-deck cousin, and the forty cards on the board are the forty thieves. The PySol Fan Club collection builds it directly on Big Forty — a one-deck game of ten columns of four — by dealing the Aces to the foundations first, which shortens the stock from twelve cards to eight and turns the game from a dig into a puzzle you can see all of.
Two of its rules deserve their citation, because they are what make it play so much lighter than its parent. Sequences move as a unit: the PySol row stack it inherits carries an unlimited move allowance, and Goodsol says the same in words, calling the game "much lighter and easier than Forty Thieves ... because sequences can be moved". And an empty column accepts anything, because the underlying stack keeps its default of any rank — BVS Solitaire states it plainly as "you can fill the space with any card or legal sequence of cards".
One rule here is a deliberate choice between conflicting sources, and it is worth naming. PySolFC allows unlimited passes through the stock; BVS Solitaire says there is no redeal. This version follows BVS. Politaire, which solved both variants across a large sample of deals, reports that unlimited passes "only slightly increase the win rate", so the cost to the player is small — and a single counted pass is what lets the game tell you honestly when a position is genuinely finished.
For the same family at full two-deck strength, play Forty Thieves or Josephine, which shares this exact ten-by-four board with two decks. For the other one-deck member, play Fortune's Favor. For a two-deck board where runs also travel, try Number Ten.
One honest note on difficulty. No published win rate for Ali Baba that we can reach carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. What can be said is that PySolFC rates the game balanced rather than lucky, and that with everything face up, a good player should do considerably better than a random one.
Because it is the one-deck version of Forty Thieves, and the forty cards dealt to the ten columns are the forty thieves. The name is a joke about the family it belongs to, and it also marks it as the lighter game of the pair.
Yes. All four are dealt up before the tableau, which is why the stock holds only eight cards rather than twelve. Without them this would simply be Big Forty, the game Ali Baba is built from.
Yes, as long as they form a packed run in the same suit descending by one. The whole run travels as a unit onto a card one rank higher in that suit, or into an empty column.
Any card, or any packed run. There is no King rule here, which is a large part of why the game plays so much more freely than two-deck Forty Thieves.
No. The stock's eight cards are dealt one at a time to the waste and that is the whole pass. Sources disagree on this point and this version follows BVS Solitaire, which says there is no redeal.
One deck instead of two, the Aces already up, a stock of eight rather than sixty-four, and packed runs that move as a unit. Every one of those differences makes the game easier, which is the point of it.