Neptune is a single-deck pairing patience played on eight piles of one card each, with a talon of forty-four cards behind them. Two exposed cards may be taken away together whenever their ranks sit next to each other — a seven with a six or an eight, a queen with a jack or a king, an ace with a two. Nothing leaves the board alone. Each pile a removal empties refills itself from the talon at once, and the game is won the moment the talon runs out, whatever is still lying on the table. Also known as Mixtures. Free in your browser, no sign-up, and it works offline once the page has loaded.
Goal: empty the talon. Every pair you take pulls another card out of it.
Neptune belongs to the family of pairing patiences that grew out of Pyramid, where the whole game is deciding which two cards to take away. Its parent in that group is Thirteens, which uses the same ten-pile idea with a sum rather than a sequence. Neptune keeps the board and changes the one rule that matters: neighbours instead of totals. That change makes it a far freer game. Almost every card has partners in two directions rather than exactly one, so the board rarely locks solid, and the open-source PySolFC collection — whose rules this version follows — rates Neptune as balanced where it rates Thirteens as luck. The unusual win condition is Neptune's own signature: the game is decided by the talon rather than by the table, which means a won game often ends with cards still sitting in front of you. It is also catalogued as Mixtures.
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Two cards are neighbours when their ranks are one apart: an ace with a two, a six with a five or a seven, a jack with a ten or a queen, a king with a queen. Suits are ignored.
No. The sequence does not wrap around. A king pairs only with a queen and an ace pairs only with a two, which is why those two ranks are the awkward ones to clear.
No. Every removal in Neptune takes exactly two cards. This is the main difference from Thirteens, where a king is worth thirteen by itself and leaves the board alone.
Neptune is won when the talon is empty, not when the table is clear. That is the game's own rule and it is deliberate — the cards left in front of you are the ones the talon could no longer replace.
No, but many more are than in Thirteens. Adjacency gives most cards two partner ranks rather than one, so the board locks solid far less often.
Mixtures is a recorded alternative name for the same eight-pile game. Pairing patiences are often collected under several names, and both describe the identical deal and rules.