Play Selective Castle Solitaire — The First Card You Bank Sets the Rank

Selective Castle takes the eight open piles of Streets and Alleys and hands you one decision the older game never offers. The four foundations start empty and unranked: while all four are still empty you may send any available card to the foundation of its own suit, and that card's rank becomes the base for all four. From there each foundation builds up in its suit, running past the king back to the ace, until it holds thirteen cards. The tableau is the family's usual suit-blind descent — any 8 accepts any 7 — with one addition: it wraps, so an ace will accept a king. No stock, no waste, no redeal. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Selective Castle?

Goal: move all 52 cards to the four foundations, thirteen cards each.

Setup

• Tableau: eight piles, all face up — four of seven cards and four of six (52 cards).
• Foundations: four empty piles with no starting rank.
• No stock, no waste, no reserves.

Rules

• While all four foundations are empty, any card may found one, on the foundation belonging to its suit.
• Once one card is placed, the other three foundations may only be started by cards of that same rank.
• Foundations build up in suit from the base rank and wrap past the king to the ace, finishing at thirteen cards.
• Tableau piles build down by one regardless of suit, wrapping: any 7 goes on any 8, and any king goes on any ace.
• Move one card at a time. Sequences never travel together.
• An empty pile accepts any single card.
• There is no redeal. When no legal move remains, the game is over.

Selective Castle Strategy

Streets and Alleys players will recognise everything except the opening, and the opening is where games are won here.

• Pick the base rank from the whole board, not the first card you see. The rank you choose has to be reachable in all four suits. Scan the eight exposed cards, then look at what sits directly beneath them, and prefer a rank whose copies are near the surface.
• The rank you choose decides which cards become kings. Base the foundations at the seven and the sixes turn into the hardest cards on the board, because a six can no longer be banked until twelve other cards of its suit have gone up. Whatever rank sits one below your base is the new blocker; plan for four of them.
• Use the wrap to unstick kings. In Streets and Alleys a king can only ever sit in a space. Here any ace will take one, which quietly makes kings movable and empty piles less precious. Look for an exposed ace before you spend six moves clearing a column.
• Bank evenly across the four suits. Because every foundation starts at the same rank, the four run in parallel, and a suit left behind tends to have its next card buried by the cards you shifted while advancing the others.

Selective Castle in the Beleaguered Castle Family

Selective Castle belongs to the open castle line that descends from Beleaguered Castle: no stock, nothing hidden, and single-card moves, where the whole challenge is the order of the dig. It is Streets and Alleys with the foundation rules of Chessboard grafted on, and the PySol Fan Club collection builds it exactly that way, inheriting from both. Thomas Warfield's Pretty Good Solitaire carries it too, describing it as medium in difficulty.

One detail is worth stating because the sources differ on it. Wikipedia's summary of the Beleaguered Castle variants can be read as letting the player choose a starting card for each foundation, which would mean four independent base ranks and a considerably easier game. The PySol implementation, the Pretty Good Solitaire text and the Politaire rules all describe a single shared base: the first card banked fixes the rank for every foundation. That is the version played here, and it is what gives the opening its weight.

For the same idea on the ten-pile Fortress board with in-suit building, play Chessboard; for the original with the aces as the only base, play Streets and Alleys.