Athena plays by Klondike's rules exactly — down in alternating colours, runs travel, Kings only in the spaces, one card off the stock, recycle as often as you like — and changes only the shape of the board. Instead of a staircase running from one card to seven, you get seven equal columns of four, dealt in alternating rows: face down, face up, face down, face up. The card counts are identical to Klondike's, 28 on the table and 24 in the stock. What changes is that no column starts as a free win and none starts as a lost cause. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.
The square board changes the arithmetic of digging. In Klondike the short columns are cheap and the long ones expensive; here every column costs the same, which makes the choice of where to dig a real one.
Athena is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Klondike variant whose only distinguishing feature is its deal: four rows to seven columns, with the first and third dealt face down and the second and fourth face up. Every other rule is inherited unchanged — the alternating-colour tableau stack with its King base rank, the single card turned from the stock, and the unlimited recycle that is Klondike's own default.
The interleaved hidden cards are unusual in this family. Every other member with face-down cards buries them in a block at the bottom of the column, which is what a staircase does naturally. Athena alternates them, so digging never settles into a rhythm: you always know the next card down and never the one after it. In this catalogue only Interchange, from the Forty Thieves family, does the same thing — on a much larger and much crueller board.
Its siblings show the other ways the Klondike rules can be re-shaped. Westcliff also flattens the staircase into equal columns, but shallower ones with only a single hidden layer. Saratoga keeps the staircase and reveals everything. Trigon keeps the staircase and tightens the build to a single suit.
One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Athena 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 trades Klondike's cheap first empty column for a board where no column is hopeless — which tends to make the early game slower and the middle game more even.
Only the shape of the deal. Athena deals seven equal columns of four with the rows alternating face down and face up, instead of a staircase of one to seven cards. The card counts are the same, and every rule is Klondike's.
The first and third rows dealt, which end up as the bottom card and the third card of every column. So each column shows two cards and hides two, fourteen hidden cards in all.
Because digging never settles into a rhythm. Removing a visible card always reveals a hidden one, and removing that reveals a card you could already see, so you can only ever plan two layers ahead.
Only a King, or a run headed by a King. Since every column starts four cards deep, an empty column takes much more work to create here than it does in Klondike.
As often as you like — redeals are unlimited. Use the first pass to learn the order of all 24 cards, since you will see them again in the same sequence.
Yes. When no move exists on the board and no card the stock can ever expose has a legal move, recycling changes nothing and the position is finished. The game works this out for you and says so.