Play Corona Solitaire — Limited's Board, and One Rule That Changes Everything

Corona and Limited are dealt the same way, built the same way, and moved the same way. Twelve columns of three cards, two decks, down by suit, one card at a time, one pass through the stock. There is exactly one difference between them, and it turns the game inside out: in Limited an empty column is your most valuable possession, and in Corona you never get to keep one. The moment a column empties, the waste's top card drops into it. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Corona?

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

Setup

• Decks: two standard decks, 104 cards.
• Tableau: twelve columns of three cards, all face up (36 cards).
• Foundations: eight, empty. The Aces are buried in the deal and the stock.
• Stock: the remaining 68 cards, turned one at a time to a waste. No redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns down by suit: the 7 of hearts onto the 8 of hearts, and nothing else.
• Move one card at a time. Packed sequences never travel as a unit.
• An empty column is filled at once from the waste — or, when the waste is bare, from the next card off the stock. You never choose what lands there.
• Once the stock and the waste are both spent, the fill can no longer fire and an empty column becomes an ordinary space that takes any card.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace. A banked card does not come back.
• One pass through the stock, one card at a time, no redeal.

Corona Strategy

Losing the free space sounds like a small tax. It is not: it removes the manoeuvre most Forty Thieves players rely on and replaces it with a timing problem.

• Look at the waste before you empty a column. This is the whole game. The card sitting on the waste is the card that will occupy the space, so the question is never "can I empty this column" but "do I want what is on the waste right now". A useful low card makes emptying a column excellent; a King you cannot build on makes the same move a loss of a working position.
• Hold a nearly-empty column back. A column with one card left is a decision you have not spent yet. Play the other side of the board, watch what the stock turns up, and cash it when the waste finally shows something worth having.
• Emptying a column is not a way to store a card. In Limited it is; here, trying to park an awkward card in a space simply hands the space to the waste instead. Every card you want out of the way has to go onto a real host, one rank up in its own suit.
• Dig for Aces early. Eight foundations need eight Aces and none of them starts up. With only three cards per column the digging is shallow, so the opening is the cheapest time to do it.
• Save the endgame. Once the stock and the waste run dry, the fill stops and any column you clear is finally yours. Positions that look finished often have a run of moves left in them for exactly this reason, so do not concede while cards remain on the board.

Corona, or The Round Dozen

Corona is an old two-deck patience listed by Parlett and by Morehead and Mott-Smith, and recorded under the alternative name The Round Dozen in George Hapgood's Solitaire and Patience. The name is the layout: the twelve piles were traditionally dealt in a ring, a crown around the foundations. A ring is a picture rather than a rule, and this catalogue lays the twelve piles in a row as Limited does — the cards behave identically either way.

The forced fill is what the sources agree on and what defines the game. Wikipedia describes Corona as "nearly identical to the variant of Limited, with the exception of an additional restriction that the deck is used to refill empty piles rather than letting the player fill them as desired", and states the mechanism plainly: "the stock is dealt one card at a time, and automatically fills empty spaces in the tableau piles". BVS Solitaire says the same — "Spaces are filled automatically from the waste or stock piles" — and the PySol Fan Club collection implements exactly that, taking the waste's top card and dealing a fresh one when the waste is empty.

That single rule is a genuinely interesting piece of design, because it removes a resource rather than adding a restriction to a move. Everything else about Corona is the family's classic line: equal columns face up, eight foundations up in suit, single-card moves, one pass through the stock. Its twin, Limited, is the control experiment — the same board with the space handed back — and playing the two in turn is the fastest way to understand what a free column is actually worth.

The same compulsion appears on a much smaller board in Fortune's Favor, a one-deck game whose Aces start on the foundations. For the family's classic ten-column deal, play Forty Thieves; for twelve columns of a single card each, Busy Aces.

One honest note on difficulty. BVS calls Corona difficult to win, Wikipedia calls it relatively long and difficult, and PySolFC rates it balanced. No published win rate for it carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. What is structural is that the game gives you sixty-eight cards through a one-way stock and no free space to work with, which is a demanding combination.