Black Hole Solitaire has a single foundation and no stock pile at all. The Ace of spades sits alone in the middle of the table, and that card is the black hole itself. The remaining 51 cards wait in small fans arranged around it, and your job is to pull every one of them into the centre, one card at a time.
Goal: Move all 52 cards into the black hole in the centre.
The centre pile behaves like a real black hole, because cards fall into it and can never come back out again. The fans around the edge represent the disc of matter still circling before it is drawn in.
Ranks run in a continuous loop, which makes King and Ace neighbours rather than opposite ends of a scale. That single rule rescues a surprising number of games. A run such as Jack, Queen, King, Ace, 2, 3 is perfectly legal, and so is 2, Ace, King, Queen. Keep the loop firmly in mind whenever a line of play appears to be stuck.
Ranks bounce up and down repeatedly, in a pattern such as 5, 6, 5, 6, 7, 8, 7, which lets you clear several fans in a single sequence.
Sometimes you must return to the same rank a second time in order to link two separate regions of the board, so it pays to plan these connecting hops early.
When a rank appears in only one location its move is effectively fixed, so finding these forced moves early tells you whether a deal is winnable at all.
Black Hole is a game of full information: every card is face up from the start, so a deal is winnable or not before you make a move. Finding the winning line is the difficult part, because each card you play decides which ranks can follow it.
Black Hole was invented by the British games writer David Parlett in 1989, who designed it deliberately as a one-foundation puzzle with a fully open board and no luck of the draw. It spread rapidly through computer solitaire collections during the 1990s and is now considered a standard inclusion.
No, some deals cannot be solved however well you play them. Every card is visible, so it usually pays to search carefully for a line before giving up on a board.
Scan all 17 fans before touching anything, noting which ranks appear only once because those moves will be forced upon you. Then choose the opening that leaves the greatest number of fans playable.
Use both directions freely, because switching between them is the very heart of the game. A single line might run 2, 3, 2, Ace, King, Queen, King, Ace, 2 without ever breaking the rules.
You can undo as many moves as you like and explore a completely different route through the board. If the position is genuinely dead the game will tell you so, and you can then start a new deal.
Cards fall into the centre pile and can never leave it again, and the name captures that one-way gravitational pull rather neatly.
Yes, the core move is identical in all three games: one rank up or one rank down. Black Hole then adds the wrap between King and Ace, removes the stock pile completely, and gives you a fully open board to plan against.
Ready to pull every card in? Play Black Hole Solitaire now.