La Belle Lucie means "the beautiful Lucy" in French, and the whole deck is spread across the table in small fans of three cards. Only the end card of each fan is available to play, so working space is extremely tight from the very first move. Two redeals give you a second and a third attempt at the same deck.
Goal: Build four foundation piles. Each runs up in one suit, from the Ace to the King.
The Redeal button unlocks when no move is left. Here is what happens:
After the second redeal no further reshuffles are available, so you must finish the game with whatever layout you have been given.
Some rule books add an option called the merci, which lets you pull a single buried card free after the last redeal. This version deliberately leaves it out, which keeps the ending unambiguous and allows the game to tell you with certainty when a board has died.
In many patience games you deliberately hold cards back from the foundations, but here that instinct works against you:
Cards trapped in the middle of a fan are the real obstacle in this game:
The same-suit building requirement makes this game unusually strict:
You are given only two redeals, so the timing of each one matters enormously:
An empty fan can never be refilled once it has gone:
La Belle Lucie is one of the older recorded patience games and has appeared in print since at least the 1870s. You may also encounter it under the names The Fan, Clover Leaf, Midnight Oil or Alexander the Great.
The four Aces begin already placed on the foundations, so only 48 cards are dealt into the fans, which makes the game noticeably easier.
The same layout but with no redeals whatsoever, which makes it considerably harder and demands very careful planning.
A fan can never grow beyond three cards, and that additional restriction changes the character of the whole game.
Fancy the challenge? Play La Belle Lucie now.
Only the exposed card at the open end of a fan is in play. The cards behind it are visible so you can plan, but they are locked until the cards above them leave.
Nothing goes into it, ever. Unlike an empty column in most solitaires, an empty fan is not a free space — it is one fewer place to put a card for the rest of the game.
Two. Each one gathers every card still in the fans, shuffles them and deals them out in threes again, so a full game can run over three deals.
The redeal is a rescue, not a resource to spend at will. It becomes available only when no legal move remains on the board.
No. One card per move, always. That restriction is what makes the suit-only building so demanding, and it applies across the whole fan family.
It is the hardest game in its family. Suit-only building means most cards have exactly one legal host on the whole table. Trefoil starts the aces for you and Super Flower Garden lets you build on any suit, if you want a gentler version of the same board.
No redeals remain. If the fans then run out of legal moves, the game is over and you can start a new deal.
Yes. The spread shows at a glance which card in each fan is free and which cards sit blocked behind it, so the whole board is readable without counting.