Fortune's Favor gives you a head start and then quietly takes something back. The four Aces are lifted onto the foundations before a card is dealt, so the long dig that opens most one-deck games simply does not happen here. What you get instead is a board of twelve single cards and a stock of thirty-six, and one rule that changes how you think about every move: an empty pile is filled at once from the waste. You never choose what goes there. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.
The name promises luck and the game does hand you a lot of it. What skill there is lives in two places: the order you empty piles in, and the twos.
Fortune's Favor is catalogued in the Forty Thieves group even though it uses a single deck. The family markers are all here: equal columns dealt face up, foundations built up in suit, single-card moves, and a stock turned one card at a time with no redeal. Morehead and Mott-Smith describe it with the Aces removed to start the foundations and twelve cards laid out in two rows of six — and add that any preferred arrangement of the twelve will do, which is why this catalogue lays them in one row.
The forced fill is the game's signature, and the books state it as a compulsion rather than a permission: spaces "are filled from the wastepile or, if there is none, the stock". The PySol Fan Club collection implements exactly that, and it is the same rule that defines Corona — the two-deck game whose only difference from Limited is this one line. Playing Fortune's Favor and Corona in turn is the clearest way to feel what the rule does to a game.
Its nearest relative by shape is Busy Aces, which also deals twelve piles of one card — but with two decks, the Aces buried, and spaces that are yours to fill. The other one-deck member of this family is Ali Baba, which keeps the pre-founded Aces and gives you a much deeper board.
One honest note on difficulty. The game is usually described as easy, but no win rate we can find comes with a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. What is certain is structural: four foundations that already hold their Aces, plus a stock that does the work of filling spaces for you, make this among the gentlest games in the family.
Because the rule says so. In Fortune's Favor a space is filled automatically from the waste, or from the next stock card when the waste is empty. Morehead and Mott-Smith state it as a compulsion, not an option, and it is the rule that gives the game its shape.
Yes. All four are removed before the deal and placed as the foundation bases, which is why the stock holds 36 cards rather than 40. It also means every 2 you uncover is playable immediately.
Yes, but only at the very end. Once the stock and the waste are both exhausted the automatic fill can no longer fire, and any pile you clear from then on behaves like an ordinary space that accepts any card.
No. Only the top card of a pile moves, one card per move, even when the cards beneath it already run down in suit. Every sequence has to be taken apart and rebuilt a card at a time.
Once. The stock deals one card at a time to the waste and there is no redeal, so a card you cannot place on its way past is gone for the rest of the game.
Three things. Fortune's Favor uses one deck to Busy Aces' two, its Aces start on the foundations rather than buried in the shuffle, and its empty piles are claimed by the waste instead of being the player's to fill.