Good Measure is Baker's Dozen reshaped. The first two Aces the shuffle turns up go straight to the foundations before a card is dealt, and the other fifty cards are laid out in ten piles of five instead of thirteen of four. Then, exactly as in Baker's Dozen, every King sinks to the bottom of its pile. Everything else is the family rule: build down by rank regardless of suit, one card at a time, and an empty pile is gone for good. No stock, no waste, no redeal. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.
Deeper piles and closed spaces make every move a commitment. Four habits keep you out of trouble.
Good Measure is one of the named variants of Baker's Dozen, the open, no-stock game whose thirteen piles gave it its name. Where Baker's Dozen deals thirteen piles of four, Good Measure deals ten piles of five, and it hands the player two Aces as a head start, which is the "good measure" of the title. The Kings-to-the-bottom rule and the closed spaces are inherited unchanged. The game appears in Thomas Warfield's Pretty Good Solitaire collection under the German name Gute Massnahme, in the PySol Fan Club collection, and in Wikipedia's survey of the Baker's Dozen variants, which describes exactly this deal.
Sources agree on every rule except one presentational detail: a single play site turns the bottom card of each pile face down. The published rule sets, and the game as it ships here, deal every card face up, so the whole board is visible from the first move and a loss is always a planning mistake rather than a surprise. Compared with its parent, the deeper piles make digging slower and the head start makes the early foundation play faster, so the game tends to swing: either the buried Aces come out and it opens up, or they do not and it locks.
If you enjoy this shape, try Baker's Dozen for the original thirteen-pile deal, Portuguese Solitaire for the same board with the Kings left loose and a space that takes a King, or Cruel for a related game that founds all four Aces and lets you redeal.
Two things. The deal is ten piles of five instead of thirteen of four, so each pile is deeper and there are fewer pile tops to work with. And two Aces are placed on the foundations before the deal, so two suits can start building immediately. The build rule, the single-card moves, the Kings-to-the-bottom rule and the closed spaces are all the same.
The first two Aces encountered in the shuffled deck, whatever suits they happen to be. That means the head start changes from deal to deal, and the two suits you have to dig for are different every game.
No. Once a pile is emptied it stays empty for the rest of the game. This is the Baker's Dozen family rule, and it means clearing a pile is usually a loss rather than a gain: you have removed a place to build without creating one.
Because the deal puts them there. After the cards are laid out, every King is moved to the bottom of its pile, keeping the order of any Kings that share a pile. A King can never be moved to a space in this game, so putting them at the bottom is what stops them from being permanent blockers.
No. Only the top card of a pile moves, one card per move, even if the cards beneath it are already in perfect descending order.
No. All 52 cards are dealt at the start, two of them to the foundations and fifty to the table. There is no stock to turn and no redeal, so every decision is made with complete information.