Play Waterloo Solitaire — Any Card Lands, Only a Suit Run Travels

Waterloo separates two questions most solitaires answer together: what may be placed on a column, and what may be lifted off it. Any card one rank lower may land — a 6 of any suit on any 7 — but only a run of the SAME suit may be picked up and moved as a unit. Build carelessly and you make columns you can never take apart. The eight Aces start on the foundations, six single cards are dealt, and ninety cards wait in a stock turned once. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Waterloo?

Goal: build all eight foundations from Ace to King by suit.

Setup

• Decks: two standard decks, 104 cards.
• Foundations: eight, each starting with its Ace.
• Tableau: six columns of a single card, face up.
• Stock: the remaining 90 cards, turned one at a time to a waste. No redeal.

Rules

• A card may be placed on a column top one rank higher, in any suit.
• Only a packed same-suit run may be moved as a unit. A mixed-suit sequence is stuck where it lies except for its top card.
• Any card may enter an empty column.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• One card off the stock at a time, and no redeal.

Waterloo Strategy

The landing rule is generous and the moving rule is strict. Every card you place off-suit is a card you will have to clear one at a time.

• Build in suit when you can, and know when you cannot. A same-suit run moves whole; a mixed run does not. Putting the 6 of clubs on the 7 of hearts is legal and sometimes necessary, but it locks the 7 until the 6 leaves.
• Six columns is very little room. Keep at least one column short so that a stock card with nowhere else to go still has a home, and try to hold one empty.
• The Aces are up, so the 2s are urgent. Every 2 that appears can go straight to a foundation; bank them before they get covered.
• Play from the waste before the board. One pass through ninety cards. A card you skip is gone unless the board changes for it later.
• Use a space to sort suits. Any card enters a space, so an empty column is where you rebuild a mixed run as two suit runs.

Waterloo and the Spider Move

PySolFC builds Waterloo on the Spider family's row stack — the rule that lets any suit land but only a suit sequence travel — and registers it in the Forty Thieves line because of its board: an open tableau over a once-through stock. The same landing-versus-travelling split appears on the Spider side of this catalogue in Tarantula and Black Widow. Here it is paired with pre-founded Aces and a tiny six-column tableau, which makes the stock the whole game.

Like every game in this family here, the first stock card is left for you to turn rather than dealt to the waste at the start.