Play Ceiling Fan Solitaire — The Fan Board, Built by Colour

Ceiling Fan takes the classic fan board — fifty-two cards spread into eighteen little fans, with only the exposed end of each one in play — and changes the building rule from suit to alternating colour. That doubles where every card can go. What it does not give you is a second chance: unlike La Belle Lucie, there is no gathered reshuffle at all. One deal, one attempt, and an empty fan that only a King may occupy. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Ceiling Fan?

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

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck, all face up.
• Tableau: eighteen fans — seventeen of three cards and one of a single card.
• Foundations: four, empty.
• No stock, no waste, and no reshuffle.

Rules

• Only the exposed end of each fan is in play — one card per fan at any moment.
• Build fans down in alternating colours, one card at a time: a red 7 onto a black 8.
• An empty fan may be filled by a King, and by nothing else.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• You win when all 52 cards are on the foundations.

Ceiling Fan Strategy

Alternating colour makes the moves easy to find. The absence of a reshuffle makes them expensive to get wrong.

• Play the whole board before you play a card. Everything is visible and nothing will ever change except by your own hand. The opening position is the entire puzzle, so read all eighteen exposed cards and find the Aces before touching anything.
• Dig for Aces first, always. Nothing banks until an Ace surfaces, and an Ace buried under two cards costs two moves that must go somewhere useful. Count the cover on each of the four before you commit.
• A cleared fan is worth having only if a King is free. Kings are the sole cards that may fill a space, so emptying a fan with no King in sight simply removes a resource. When a King is available, though, an empty fan is a genuine dumping ground for it — Kings are otherwise dead weight on this board.
• Do not bank a card the tableau still needs. Foundations are one-way. A black 4 on an exposed end accepts either red 3, which on a board this cramped is often worth more than one card of progress.
• Accept that some deals are lost from the start. With no reshuffle and no hidden information, a position with no legal move is finished — and the game will say so rather than let you click on. That is the honest cost of the missing redeal.

Ceiling Fan in the Fan Family

Ceiling Fan is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Fan variant, and its class is a single line: swap the tableau stack for one that builds by alternating colour with a King base rank. Everything else — the eighteen fans, the three-card spread, the absence of a talon — comes from the base Fan game unchanged.

That base game is the ancestor of the whole fan line, and its most famous descendant is La Belle Lucie, which adds two gathered reshuffles. The reshuffle is what makes La Belle Lucie playable; without it, as here, the deal you are given is the deal you must solve. The alternating-colour rule is the compensation, and whether it is enough is a fair question — this is a demanding game.

One rule here is worth stating precisely, because it differs from its siblings in this catalogue. The books' rule for the La Belle Lucie line is that an empty fan is never refilled, and Trefoil, Shamrocks and Super Flower Garden all keep it. PySolFC's Fan branch instead gives its members a King base rank, and Ceiling Fan is one of them. Rather than bend the game to a rule its own source does not state, the shared engine now lets each member say which it means.

For the classic suit build with two reshuffles, play La Belle Lucie; for the same board with the Aces founded first, Trefoil. For sixteen even fans and a King rule like this one, play Box Fan.

One honest note on difficulty. No published win rate for Ceiling Fan that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally the colour rule helps a great deal and the missing reshuffle hurts more: expect to lose more often than at La Belle Lucie despite the looser building.