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Play Scorpion Head Solitaire — Seven Columns and the Scorpion Move

Scorpion Head deals the entire pack. The first three columns hold eight cards, all face up; the remaining four hold seven, with four hidden beneath three. Nothing is held back — there is no stock, and no row will ever come down to loosen a stuck board.

What you get instead is four free cells. Each holds a single card, and that card can come back out to a column or to a foundation. They are the entire margin of safety in the game, so spend them deliberately: a cell filled with a card that has nowhere to return to is a cell you no longer have.

How Scorpion Head Is Won

You build downwards in suit: a card may land on the card one rank above it of the same suit, and only of the same suit. When a column contains a complete run from king down to ace, all of one suit, that run leaves the board and counts as one collected set. Gather all four sets and the game is won. There are no foundation piles to feed one card at a time; the run is assembled in the tableau itself and removed whole.

The Move That Makes It Scorpion

The Scorpion move is the whole character of this line, and it is worth stating plainly. In almost every other solitaire you may only lift a tidy sequence. Here you may lift any face-up card, and every card resting on it comes along, in whatever jumbled order it happens to be. A king with a stray four and a nine piled on top travels as a unit of three. Nothing is asked of the tail beyond every card in it being face up.

The strategy that follows from this is unusual. Because a disordered tail travels, burying a card is far less permanent than it looks; what actually costs you the game is a card trapped under a face-down one, because you cannot carry what you cannot see. So the opening priority is always the same: turn hidden cards over. Prefer any move that exposes a face-down card, even a move that looks untidy, and be suspicious of a move that merely rearranges cards you can already see.

Reading the Opening Board

Before touching a card, count the face-down cards in each column. Those numbers are the real difficulty of the deal, and they tell you where the work is. Look for cards of the same suit sitting one rank apart in different columns, because those are the joins that will eventually become a collected set. Look also for aces buried deep: an ace is the last card of a set and a set cannot leave the board without it, so an ace under four face-down cards is a problem you will have to solve eventually and may as well start on early.

Common Mistakes

The first is treating the Scorpion move as a free pass. It is powerful, but every card you pile onto a column is a card sitting above something else, and depth eventually becomes its own obstacle. The second is chasing a tidy-looking sequence at the cost of leaving a face-down card buried; sequences can always be rebuilt, whereas a hidden card that never gets uncovered ends the game. The third is emptying a column with no plan for it. A space is the most valuable thing on the board, and filling it back in with the first card that fits usually wastes it.

Difficulty and Pace

This is a thinking game rather than a fast one. Most deals reward slow, deliberate play, and a single careless move early can quietly decide the outcome twenty moves later. Use undo freely while you are learning the shape of the board — the point is to understand why a line of play failed, not to protect a statistic.