Play Courtyard Solitaire — Busy Aces With the Spaces Taken Away

Busy Aces deals twelve single cards over ninety-two in the stock and gives you two things to work with: the columns and the spaces you make. Courtyard keeps the board and takes one of them back. The moment a column empties, the top of the waste drops into it — and if the waste is bare, the next card off the stock is turned and dropped in instead. You never keep a space. In exchange it gives you something Busy Aces withholds: a packed run of the same suit moves as a unit. Those two changes, one taken and one given, make it a different game on an identical deal. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Courtyard?

Goal: build all eight foundations from Ace to King by suit.

Setup

• Decks: two standard decks, 104 cards.
• Tableau: twelve columns of a single card, all face up.
• Foundations: eight, empty; the Aces are somewhere in the deal and the stock.
• Stock: the remaining 92 cards, turned one at a time to a waste. No redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns down by suit: the 7 of hearts onto the 8 of hearts, and nothing else.
• A packed same-suit run moves as a unit, however long it is.
• An emptied column is filled at once from the top of the waste — or, when the waste is empty, from the next card turned off the stock. You do not choose the card.
• Once the stock and the waste are both spent, a space is finally yours and any card may enter it.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• One card off the stock at a time, and no redeal.

Courtyard Strategy

Ninety-two cards arrive from the stock and you see each one once. With no space to park anything, the whole game is about keeping twelve column tops useful.

• Spread the suits across the columns. Twelve tops that show twelve different suit-and-rank requests catch far more of the stock than twelve tops that show the same three. Early on, put cards where they widen what you can accept, not where they build the longest run.
• Use the run move to re-home, not to tidy. Because a packed run travels whole, you can lift a five-card suit run off one column and set it on the right six in another, freeing the card underneath. That is the only way to reach a buried card in this game, and it is worth planning columns around.
• Think about what the fill will drop. Emptying a column does not give you a space; it gives you whatever is on the waste. If the waste top is a card you want somewhere else, do not empty a column until you have played it.
• Do not skip a playable waste card. There is one pass. A card left on the waste is a card you will only see again if a forced fill happens to drop it into a column.
• Save the last columns for late. Once the stock is gone the fill stops and spaces become real. A column you can empty in the endgame is worth more than one you empty now.

Courtyard, Busy Aces and Limited

PySolFC registers Courtyard as Busy Aces with two lines changed: runs may move, and empty rows fill themselves. It is the same relationship Corona has to Limited — one forced fill separating two games on one board — and the pairing is worth playing back to back. Busy Aces rewards holding a space and dealing carefully into it; Courtyard punishes anyone who tries, and rewards the player who keeps the tops varied and moves whole runs at the right moment.

Like every game in the Forty Thieves family here, the first card of the stock is left for you to turn rather than dealt to the waste at the start.