Play Forty and Eight Solitaire Online — Forty Thieves With a Second Chance

Forty and Eight is a two-deck member of the Forty Thieves family, named for the French railway boxcars of the First World War stencilled "40 hommes / 8 chevaux" — forty men or eight horses. The name fits the shape of the deal: eight tableau columns of five cards each, forty cards face up, over a stock of sixty-four. What separates it from its stern parent is a single concession — you may turn the waste over once.

Setup

• Tableau: eight columns of five cards, all face up. Forty cards visible from the first click.
• Stock: the remaining 64 cards, face down.
• Waste: one card at a time from the stock; only its top card is in play.
• Foundations: eight piles, two per suit, built up from ace to king.

Rules

• The tableau builds down by suit — the 7 of hearts goes on the 8 of hearts and nowhere else.
• Move one card at a time. Even a perfectly ordered same-suit run must be carried across one card per move.
• An empty column takes any single card, from the tableau or from the waste.
• Click the stock to turn one card to the waste. When the stock is empty you may redeal once: the waste turns over, unshuffled, to become a new stock.
• Foundations are one-way — a card that goes up stays up.

Strategy

Treat the first pass as ordering the second. The redeal does not shuffle, so the sequence you leave in the waste is the sequence you will meet again. A card you bury early comes back early. Experienced players think of the first pass less as a search for playable cards and more as an arrangement of the deck they will play from.

Open a column before the stock runs out. With suit-only building, most cards have exactly one legal host, and an empty column is the only place a homeless card can rest. A space opened during the first pass is worth several during the second, when your options have narrowed.

Dig for aces and twos at almost any cost. Two decks means every rank appears twice, so a buried ace is not fatal — but a suit whose ace and two are both deep in the tableau will stall both of its foundations, and that is half your outlets gone.

Do not spend a space on comfort. Filling an empty column to tidy a stack trades your most valuable asset for a cosmetic gain. Hold it until a specific card needs it.

Where It Sits in the Forty Thieves Family

Forty Thieves is the parent of one of the largest variant families in patience, and the members differ from each other by remarkably little — usually the deal shape, the building rule, or whether the stock may be turned a second time. Forty and Eight sits at the forgiving end: the classic ten-by-four deal is replaced with a shallower eight-by-five, and the single redeal roughly doubles a careful player's chances against Forty Thieves proper. If you know one member you can read the others at a glance, which is why players tend to work through the family rather than settle on one.

Other Games to Try

• Forty Thieves — the strict parent — no redeal at all
• Streets — the same board built in alternating colours
• Lucas — aces start up and the columns run shallow
• Limited — twelve columns of three, spread wide

About This Version

Forty and Eight runs in your browser — free, no download, no sign-up. Install it as an app on your phone or computer and it works offline. You get unlimited undo, a hint button that names a legal move, statistics that track your wins and times, and seeded deals: every game has a seed you can replay, so a board you enjoyed (or lost) can be played again exactly.