Play Chessboard Solitaire — You Choose Where the Foundations Start

Chessboard is the friendly member of the Fortress family, and one decision makes it so. The 52 cards are dealt face up into ten piles, and the four foundations begin empty and unranked. While all four are still empty you may send any available card to one, and the rank of that card becomes the base for all four foundations. Choose the seven and every foundation runs 7, 8, 9 up to the king, then round the corner to the ace and on to the six. The tableau is generous too: build up or down by one in the same suit, with the same wrap, so an ace hosts a king as happily as it hosts a two. No stock, no waste, no redeal. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Chessboard?

Goal: move all 52 cards to the four foundations, thirteen cards each.

Setup

• Tableau: ten piles, all face up — two of six cards and eight of five (52 cards).
• Foundations: four empty piles with no starting rank. The first card you play to one decides the rank for all four.
• No stock, no waste, no reserves. Every card is visible from the first move.

Rules

• While all four foundations are empty, any card may found one — on the foundation belonging to its own suit.
• Once one card is placed, the other three foundations may only be started by cards of that same rank.
• Foundations build up in suit from the base rank and wrap: the king is followed by the ace. A foundation is finished at thirteen cards.
• Tableau piles build up or down by one in the same suit, wrapping both ways: on a black 4 you may place the black 3 or the black 5, and on an ace the king or the two.
• Move one card at a time. Sequences never travel together.
• An empty pile accepts any single card.
• There is no redeal. When no legal move remains, the game is over.

Chessboard Strategy

The opening choice is the game. Everything after it is bookkeeping, so spend real time on it.

• Count the ranks before you found anything. Look at the ten exposed cards and find the rank that appears most often, and whose other copies sit shallowest. Founding a rank whose four cards are all buried six deep is how a Chessboard game dies on move three.
• Do not found at all while a tableau move helps you. Founding is irreversible in effect: it locks the other three foundations forever. Make the builds that expose cards first, look again, then choose.
• Remember that up-or-down building cuts both ways. Being able to place the 3 or the 5 on a black 4 doubles your options, but it also means a pile can shuffle back and forth without progressing. Prefer the direction that uncovers something.
• An empty pile is the only real storage you have. Clearing one takes five or six moves and is usually worth it, because any card may sit there. Aim at the shortest pile whose cards have homes elsewhere.

Chessboard in the Fortress Family

Chessboard, also called Fives, is a variant of Fortress: the same ten-pile deal, the same single-card moves and open spaces, with two rules relaxed. Fortress builds down in suit only and founds from the aces; Chessboard builds up or down, wraps from king to ace, and lets the player choose the base rank. The PySol Fan Club collection carries both and recommends Chessboard as the more enjoyable of the pair, and Wikipedia's account of the Fortress variants — citing Morehead's Hoyle's Rules of Games — records the free choice of starting rank and the round-the-corner building.

Its nearest sibling here is Selective Castle, which applies the same chosen base and the same wrap to the eight-pile Streets and Alleys board, and builds down regardless of suit instead of up or down in one. Playing the two in turn is the clearest way to feel how much the packing rule matters once the foundations behave the same way.

For the stricter original, play Fortress; for the same board with the aces founded before the deal, try Beleaguered Castle.