Play Foothold Solitaire — Build Up or Down, One Card at a Time

Most of the Forty Thieves family builds in one direction only. Foothold lets a column go either way: a red 6 or a red 8 may land on a black 7, and a column can turn back on itself as often as the cards allow. The price is that only one card moves at a time, so a long column is a long job to unpick. Eight columns of five, two decks, forty cards dealt face up over a stock of sixty-four turned once. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Foothold?

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

Setup

• Decks: two standard decks, 104 cards.
• Tableau: eight columns of five cards, all face up.
• Foundations: eight, empty.
• Stock: the remaining 64 cards, turned one at a time to a waste. No redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns up or down by one rank, in alternating colours: a red 6 or a red 8 on a black 7.
• Move one card at a time. Sequences never travel as a unit.
• Any card may enter an empty column.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• One card off the stock at a time, and no redeal.

Foothold Strategy

Two directions of build means almost every card has a home somewhere; the difficulty is entirely in the single-card move.

• Never bury what you will need. A card placed on a column can only leave one card at a time, so putting a 7 on a column and then five more cards on top of it is a commitment. Think of each column as a stack you will have to unload in reverse.
• Zig-zag to keep a column open. Building 7, 8, 7, 6 on one column keeps its top card near the middle ranks, where the most stock cards can land. A column that runs straight down to a 2 accepts almost nothing.
• Empty a column early. Any card may enter a space, and with single-card moves a space is the only way to reorder anything. Clear one of the eight and keep it as your working area.
• Play the waste first. One pass through the stock: a card you skip is gone unless the board changes for it later. A board move can usually wait a turn.
• Watch for both copies. Two decks means every card exists twice. When a foundation needs a 5, there are two of them; know where the second one is before you dig for the first.

Foothold in the Forty Thieves Line

PySolFC registers Foothold as a Forty Thieves game with the up-or-down alternate-colour row stack and a five-deep deal across eight columns, and rates it mostly skill. The up-or-down build is rare in this family — most members insist on one direction — and it is what makes a single-card game with forty cards face up playable at all. The same build in suit appears on the FreeCell side of the catalogue in Bastion and Ten by One.

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