Interchange takes the Forty Thieves family somewhere none of its relatives go. Seven columns are dealt seven deep, and the rows alternate: the first face up, the second face down, the third face up, and so on to the bottom of the board. Every column therefore holds four cards you can see and three you cannot, interleaved — so digging is never a straight run of known cards, it is a known card, then a surprise, then a known card. Add suit building, moving runs and spaces that only a King may enter, and you have the hardest open-stock game in this family. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all eight foundations from Ace to King by suit.
This is a hard game and it deserves to be played carefully. The alternating rows mean that the cost of every dig is known only halfway.
Interchange is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Forty Thieves game, and it earns the label: two decks, equal columns, eight foundations built up in suit, a stock turned one card at a time, and no redeal. What it contributes of its own is the deal. The board is built by dealing a face-up row, then a face-down row, three times over, and finishing with one more face-up row — which is exactly the alternation the name means.
Two further rules come straight from the same source and are worth stating. Only a King may fill a space: the collection wraps the tableau stacks with a King base rank, Goodsol ships "Kings fill spaces" as the default with "any card" offered as an easy setting, and other listings say it in words — "A King may move to an empty tableau, but no other cards may move to an empty tableau." And packed runs move as a unit, which is the concession that keeps seven-deep columns tractable.
There is no redeal here, and Goodsol supplies the cleanest citation for it while describing the game's sibling: "Unlimited is just like Interchange except that you get unlimited redeals instead of no redeals." A version of Interchange does circulate in which spaces take any card and one redeal is allowed — that is Goodsol's own "Interchange (Easy)" option travelling under the plain name, not a second reading of the game, and it is not followed here.
Its nearest relatives in this catalogue hide their cards differently. Emperor and Rank and File bury whole rows at the bottom of shallow four-deep columns, so the hidden cards are a single block to be dug through once. Indian Patience hides only its base row. Interchange interleaves them all the way up, which is a genuinely different problem. For the family's open-board classic, play Forty Thieves; for the same suit build with everything visible, Josephine.
One honest note on difficulty. Goodsol calls Interchange extremely difficult and PySolFC rates it mostly skill, but no published win rate for the game itself carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Its sibling Unlimited is the same board with unlimited redeals, so Interchange, with a single pass, is the harder of the two.
Because of the deal. The rows alternate face up and face down all the way up each column, so visible and hidden cards interchange as you dig. It is the only game in this family whose hidden cards are interleaved rather than stacked at the bottom.
Twenty-one. Each of the seven columns holds seven cards, four face up and three face down, and a hidden card turns up the moment play exposes it.
Only a King, or a run headed by a King in the same suit. No other card may take a space, which is why clearing a column is worth little unless you have a King ready to occupy it.
Yes. A packed run descending by one in a single suit travels as a unit. Without that concession the seven-deep columns would be effectively impossible to dig through.
No. The fifty-five stock cards are dealt one at a time to the waste in a single pass. The sibling game Unlimited is exactly this board with unlimited redeals instead.
Where the hidden cards sit. Emperor buries three whole rows at the bottom of four-deep columns, so you dig through one block. Interchange interleaves hidden cards between visible ones in seven-deep columns, and it builds by suit rather than by colour.