Blind Alleys removes almost every restriction the Klondike family usually imposes. The four Aces are on the foundations before the deal. The columns are only three cards deep. An empty column takes any card, not just a King. Packed runs move as a unit. You even get a redeal. And yet the name is a warning, because with six short columns and thirty cards coming past you one at a time, the way a game ends here is by running out of places to put things — quietly, and usually earlier than you expected. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.
With this much freedom the danger is not being blocked, it is spending your freedom on nothing. Six columns is very few, and each one you fill badly is one you cannot easily unfill.
Blind Alleys is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a descendant of the Eastcliff branch of Klondike: six columns dealt two rows face down and one face up, the four Aces lifted to the foundations before the tableau, one redeal, and the plain alternating-colour tableau stack that both opens spaces to any card and lets packed runs travel.
Its twin is Lanes, and the two are worth playing back to back. The columns, the build, the Aces and the redeal are the same, and the spaces are open in both. Two things differ: Lanes deals all eighteen tableau cards face up where Blind Alleys hides twelve of them, and Lanes permits only one card per move. PySolFC's own difficulty ratings capture the effect: Blind Alleys is rated mostly luck, Lanes balanced. Handed a free run move on a board this shallow, most of the interesting decisions collapse — and what is left is whether the stock cooperates.
The catalogue carries pairs like this deliberately, because a rule that changes how every plan is executed is not a setting. Emperor and Rank and File in the Forty Thieves family differ by the same single flag and play just as differently.
For the same shallow board with Kings-only spaces and no pre-founded Aces, play Westcliff. For the family's full staircase, play Klondike.
One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Blind Alleys mostly luck, and no published win rate for it that we can reach carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. What is structural: the free Aces, the open spaces and the run move make the game generous, while six columns and a single redeal make it short — which is a combination that produces both quick wins and quick dead ends.
Two ways. Blind Alleys hides the lower two cards of each column and lets a packed run travel; Lanes deals every card face up and moves one card at a time. Both start with the four Aces on the foundations, both open their spaces to any card and both give one redeal.
Yes, all four are lifted before the tableau is dealt. That is why the stock holds 30 cards rather than 34, and it means every 2 you uncover can be banked immediately.
Any card, or any packed run. There is no King rule here, which makes a space the most flexible resource on the board — and the easiest one to waste on a card that does nothing.
Because of how the game ends. With only six columns and a single pass plus a redeal, a position where nothing on the waste fits anywhere is common, and it arrives without much warning.
Twice. The stock turns one card at a time to the waste, and after it empties you may recycle the waste exactly once. After that second pass there is nothing left to turn.
Usually not. A space accepts anything, so it is worth keeping until it does real work — freeing a hidden card, or letting you relocate a run that unblocks a suit. A card dropped in idly turns your best resource into a blockage.