Play Neptune Solitaire — Take Neighbouring Ranks Off an Eight-Pile Board

Neptune is a single-deck pairing patience played on eight piles of one card each, with a talon of forty-four cards behind them. Two exposed cards may be taken away together whenever their ranks sit next to each other — a seven with a six or an eight, a queen with a jack or a king, an ace with a two. Nothing leaves the board alone. Each pile a removal empties refills itself from the talon at once, and the game is won the moment the talon runs out, whatever is still lying on the table. Also known as Mixtures. Free in your browser, no sign-up, and it works offline once the page has loaded.

How Do You Play Neptune?

Goal: empty the talon. Every pair you take pulls another card out of it.

Setup

• Eight piles: one card each, face-up, dealt in a single row.
• Talon: the remaining 44 cards, face-down beside the row.
• No foundations and no building. Cards only ever leave the game.

Rules

• Card ranks run ace, two, three and so on up to king. Ace is low.
• Click two exposed cards whose ranks are one apart to remove them both. A nine goes with an eight or a ten; a king goes with a queen.
• The sequence does not wrap. A king does not pair with an ace, and an ace pairs only with a two.
• Suits and colours are ignored entirely. Only the rank counts.
• No card is ever removed on its own. Every removal takes exactly two cards.
• A pile emptied by a removal immediately turns the next talon card face-up into the space. You never choose this.
• You win the moment the talon is empty — cards left on the board do not count against you. You lose when no two exposed cards are neighbours.

What's the Best Neptune Strategy?

• Remember what you are actually racing. The win condition is an empty talon, not an empty board. Every pair drains two cards out of the talon, so the game is a straight count: forty-four cards, twenty-two removals, and you have won. Never delay a legal pair to tidy the board.
• Break up clusters of one rank. Three sevens sitting on the board are three cards that cannot help each other — sevens do not pair with sevens. Spend a six or an eight on one of them rather than saving that partner for later.
• Guard the ends of the sequence. An ace has only one partner rank, and so does a king. A middle card such as a seven has two. When a choice is offered, clear the ace or the king first, while its single partner is still on the table.
• Prefer the pair that turns over two piles you like. Both cards refill, so every removal is two unknown cards arriving. Early on that is pure gain; the board is nearly always improved by movement.
• Late on, the board is all you have. Once the talon is down to a handful, a removal may refill only one pile or none at all. From there, look ahead: check that the pair you take does not leave the remaining cards spread across ranks that are two or more apart.

A Short History

Neptune belongs to the family of pairing patiences that grew out of Pyramid, where the whole game is deciding which two cards to take away. Its parent in that group is Thirteens, which uses the same ten-pile idea with a sum rather than a sequence. Neptune keeps the board and changes the one rule that matters: neighbours instead of totals. That change makes it a far freer game. Almost every card has partners in two directions rather than exactly one, so the board rarely locks solid, and the open-source PySolFC collection — whose rules this version follows — rates Neptune as balanced where it rates Thirteens as luck. The unusual win condition is Neptune's own signature: the game is decided by the talon rather than by the table, which means a won game often ends with cards still sitting in front of you. It is also catalogued as Mixtures.

About This Version

This Neptune runs in your browser — free, no download, no sign-up. Install it as an app on your phone or computer; once installed it works offline. Unlimited undo, statistics, and a daily challenge that gives every player the same deal that day.

Other Solitaire Games to Try

• Thirteens — the same board, but pair to a total of thirteen
• Golf — neighbouring ranks again, played onto one waste pile
• Monte Carlo — match same-rank pairs on a compacting grid
• Pyramid — the classic pair-to-thirteen triangle