Play Jungle Solitaire — The Gaps Grid Without the Suits

Jungle takes Blue Moon's board — four rows of fourteen, every card face up, four gaps to work with — and removes the suit from the fill rule. Any card one rank higher than the card to a gap's left will fit, whatever it is. That sounds like a gift and it is only half of one, because the win condition never changed: a row is finished only when it reads Ace to King in a single suit. So a row you can fill in seconds is very often a row you will have to pull apart again. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Jungle?

Goal: make every row read Ace to King in a single suit.

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck, all face up.
• Grid: four rows of fourteen. Every slot but the leftmost is dealt a card; the four Aces are then moved into those leftmost slots, leaving four gaps.
• Redeals: one gathered reshuffle, offered only when no move remains.

Rules

• A gap is filled by any card one rank higher than the card immediately to its left. Suit does not matter.
• A gap in the leftmost column takes an Ace, and nothing else.
• A gap to the right of another gap, or of a King, is dead.
• Moving a card leaves a new gap where it was.
• You get one redeal: cards already seated in a run from their row's Ace stay, the rest are gathered, shuffled and laid out again.
• You win when every row reads Ace to King in one suit.

Jungle Strategy

Legal moves are everywhere. Useful ones are not, and telling them apart is the entire game.

• Fill with the right suit whenever you have the choice. Often two or three cards will fit the same gap. Taking the one that matches the run's suit costs nothing now and saves the whole row later.
• A wrong-suit fill is a debt, not progress. It closes a gap and opens another somewhere you may not want it, and the card will have to move again. Make one only when it buys a specific opening.
• Decide each row's suit early. Every row is headed by an Ace, and that Ace names the suit the row must end up in. Read all four before you move.
• Guard the single redeal. One is not many, and it only fires when nothing at all can move — so you cannot waste it by accident, but you can arrive at it with nothing seated.
• Watch where the new gap opens. Every fill leaves a hole behind. One beside a King or another gap is dead space you paid a move for.

Jungle in the Gaps Family

Jungle is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Blue Moon variant, and its class does two things: swap the row stack for one whose accept rule drops the suit comparison, and cut the redeals from two to one. Everything else — the four rows of fourteen, the Aces seated at the head of each row, the leftmost gap that takes an Ace — is inherited unchanged.

The pairing of a loosened build with an unchanged goal is a shape this catalogue keeps meeting. Black Widow lets any descending run travel in the Spider family while still demanding single-suit sets; KingCell builds suit-blind in FreeCell while its foundations still take suits. In each case the freedom is real and it does not shorten the game — it moves the difficulty from finding a move to choosing one.

For the strict version of this board, play Blue Moon. For the same grid with the rule loosened the other way — same suit, any higher rank — try Spaces and Aces. For the family's classic twelve-card rows with the Aces out of play entirely, play Gaps.

One honest note on difficulty. No published win rate for Jungle that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally the loose fill and the single redeal pull against each other, and the result is a game that rarely stalls early and often cannot be finished.