Canfield is famous for being unfair in two particular ways. Its thirteen-card reserve sits face down under a single top card, so you spend the game guessing at what you are digging towards; and the moment you empty a column, the reserve takes the space before you can use it. Superior Canfield removes both. The reserve is dealt face up and spread, so every one of the thirteen cards is in front of you from the first click, and an emptied column stays empty until you decide what belongs there. Everything else is untouched: a turned card sets the base rank, the foundations wrap past the King, and the stock turns three at a time forever. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: move all 52 cards to the four foundations.
The two concessions change what kind of game this is. Canfield is a gamble you manage; Superior Canfield is a plan you execute, and the plan starts before your first move.
The name is a claim about fairness, not difficulty, and it is a fair claim. Both changes give information or freedom back to the player, and neither loosens a single build rule. The board is identical, the arithmetic is identical, and the win still needs all 52 cards banked. What changes is that a loss is now clearly yours: you could see the reserve, you could keep the space, and you still could not find the line. Players coming from Klondike usually find Superior Canfield the friendliest way into the Canfield family, because the visible reserve makes the base-rank arithmetic something you can practise deliberately instead of something you absorb by losing.
It also rewards patience differently. Because a space survives, a slow game of shuffling cards between columns to reach one buried card is a real strategy here, where in Canfield the reserve would keep eating your work. Take the extra moves.
Two rules change. The thirteen-card reserve is dealt face up and spread so you can read every card in it, and an emptied tableau column is not automatically refilled from the reserve. Every other rule — the turned base rank, the wrapping foundations, the alternating-colour build, the three-card turn and the unlimited redeals — is exactly Canfield's.
One card is turned before the deal and its rank becomes the base for all four foundations. That single card decides the whole arithmetic of the board, which is the Canfield family's signature. Because the foundations wrap past the King back to the Ace, every foundation still holds thirteen cards whatever the base turns out to be.
Yes, and you should. This is the second of the two deltas. In Canfield the reserve claims a space the instant one opens, so spaces are worthless. Here a space survives until you choose to fill it, and any card may go into it, which makes it the most useful thing on the board.
It makes it fairer, not easy. You still cannot reorder the reserve — the cards come out in one fixed order, top first — so knowing what is buried mostly tells you how expensive a plan will be. Many deals are still unwinnable; you simply find out sooner.
The stock can be recycled as often as you like, but turning three at a time means most cards stay unreachable unless the phase shifts. Playing one card off the waste changes which cards sit on top of each group of three. If a whole pass yields no playable card, the game is over — the same cards will surface again in the same order.
Yes. The tableau wraps in this family, so a King may be packed onto an Ace, and an Ace onto a 2, in alternating colours. It is one of the most commonly missed moves in Canfield games and often the only way to clear a column.