Chameleon is the Canfield family with its build rule dropped entirely. A card will sit on anything one rank above it — any suit, any colour — and a packed run travels as a unit. That is a lot of freedom, and the game takes it straight back with the narrowest board in the family: three tableau columns, a twelve-card reserve you can only take from the top, and no redeal. What you can do with a card is unrestricted; where you can put it is not.
Three columns is the real rule. The build rule asks nothing, so every decision is about space. With three places to put anything and thirty-six cards still to come through the waste, the board fills faster than it empties — and every card you park is a column you have partly spent.
Move runs, do not build them. Because suits are irrelevant, runs form by accident constantly. That makes them cheap to assemble and cheap to move, so treat a stack as something to relocate onto a foundation-feeding column rather than something to admire.
The base rank decides which cards are precious. If the deal picks a four, then threes are the last cards of every suit and fives are the first. Work out which ranks you need early and stop treating aces as valuable by habit.
There is no redeal, so the waste is one-way. Thirty-six cards pass once. Play the board out before every click — with a build rule this loose, there is almost always something legal to do first.
The Canfield family is built on one idea no other family uses: the deal turns a card, and that card's rank is where all four foundations start, wrapping past the king to the ace. Around it sit a reserve you may only take from the top and empty columns that refill themselves from it. The members then differ by what the tableau builds on and how much board there is: Chameleon takes the loosest possible build and pays for it with three columns and no redeal; Eagle Wing takes the strictest (suit only) and gets eight wings and two redeals; Storehouse sits between them, fixing the base rank at the twos.
Chameleon runs in your browser — free, no download, no sign-up. Install it as an app on your phone or computer and it works offline. You get unlimited undo, a hint button that names a legal move, statistics that track your wins and times, and seeded deals: every game has a seed you can replay, so a board you enjoyed (or lost) can be played again exactly.
Completely. Any 7 goes on any 8. Suit matters only on the foundations, which build up in suit from the base rank — and that gap between the two rules is where the difficulty lives.
That is the deal, and it is what pays for the free build rule. With three places to put anything, space is the constraint rather than legality.
The deal turns one card and its rank starts all four foundations. A board based on fours runs 4, 5, ..., K, A, 2, 3. It is the family's defining rule.
Yes. A sequence packed by rank alone is a legal run here, however mixed, and it moves as a unit.
No. Thirty-six cards pass the waste exactly once, which is the main pressure in a game that otherwise refuses very little.
The reserve refills an emptied column automatically, and you do not choose the card. A space is only yours once the reserve has run out.