Ceiling Fan takes the classic fan board — fifty-two cards spread into eighteen little fans, with only the exposed end of each one in play — and changes the building rule from suit to alternating colour. That doubles where every card can go. What it does not give you is a second chance: unlike La Belle Lucie, there is no gathered reshuffle at all. One deal, one attempt, and an empty fan that only a King may occupy. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.
Alternating colour makes the moves easy to find. The absence of a reshuffle makes them expensive to get wrong.
Ceiling Fan is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Fan variant, and its class is a single line: swap the tableau stack for one that builds by alternating colour with a King base rank. Everything else — the eighteen fans, the three-card spread, the absence of a talon — comes from the base Fan game unchanged.
That base game is the ancestor of the whole fan line, and its most famous descendant is La Belle Lucie, which adds two gathered reshuffles. The reshuffle is what makes La Belle Lucie playable; without it, as here, the deal you are given is the deal you must solve. The alternating-colour rule is the compensation, and whether it is enough is a fair question — this is a demanding game.
One rule here is worth stating precisely, because it differs from its siblings in this catalogue. The books' rule for the La Belle Lucie line is that an empty fan is never refilled, and Trefoil, Shamrocks and Super Flower Garden all keep it. PySolFC's Fan branch instead gives its members a King base rank, and Ceiling Fan is one of them. Rather than bend the game to a rule its own source does not state, the shared engine now lets each member say which it means.
For the classic suit build with two reshuffles, play La Belle Lucie; for the same board with the Aces founded first, Trefoil. For sixteen even fans and a King rule like this one, play Box Fan.
One honest note on difficulty. No published win rate for Ceiling Fan that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally the colour rule helps a great deal and the missing reshuffle hurts more: expect to lose more often than at La Belle Lucie despite the looser building.
Two ways. Ceiling Fan builds down in alternating colours where La Belle Lucie builds by suit, and it gives you no gathered reshuffle at all where La Belle Lucie allows two. The eighteen-fan board is the same.
A King, and nothing else. That follows the PySol Fan Club collection's reading of this branch of the family; several of its siblings in this catalogue keep the older book rule that a space is never refilled at all.
Just one — the exposed end. The cards beneath it are visible but locked until everything above them has been played away, which is what makes a three-card fan a two-move problem.
None. The base Fan game deals once and never again, so the position you are given is the whole puzzle. That is the sharpest difference from La Belle Lucie and its relatives.
No. All 52 are face up from the start. Nothing about this game is a guess — it is a pure planning problem, and a deal with no legal move is genuinely finished.
Only when a King is available to occupy it. Since a King is the sole card that may fill a space, emptying a fan without one simply removes a resource you cannot get back.