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.
Goal: build all eight foundations from Ace to King by suit.
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.
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.
Two rules. A packed same-suit run may be moved as a unit, where Busy Aces moves one card at a time. And an emptied column is filled immediately from the waste, or from the next stock card when the waste is empty, where Busy Aces lets you keep the space. Same twelve-card deal, same suit build, same one pass through the stock.
Only after the stock and the waste are both exhausted. Until then every column you empty is refilled at once with a card you did not choose. In the endgame, with nothing left to fill from, a space becomes an ordinary one and any card may enter it.
The next card is turned off the stock and placed straight into the column. So a forced fill can cost you a stock card you never got to see on the waste, which is a reason to keep the waste stocked with a card you can afford to lose before you empty anything.
No. The 92 stock cards are turned once, one at a time, and when the stock is empty it stays empty. A card you pass on the waste is gone unless a later forced fill happens to bring it back to the board.
Any length, as long as it is packed down by suit with no gaps. That is what makes Courtyard playable at all: with no spaces to park cards in, moving a whole run to reach the card beneath it is the only way to dig.
Most players find Courtyard harder to plan but faster to play. The run move lets you reorganise the board quickly, but losing every space removes the safety valve Busy Aces relies on. PySolFC rates both as balanced.