Play Box Fan Solitaire — Sixteen Even Fans, and the Aces Already Up

Box Fan is the tidiest board in the fan family. The four Aces are lifted onto the foundations before anything is dealt, and the forty-eight cards that remain divide exactly into sixteen fans of three — no awkward short fan at the end, which is what the name's neatness refers to. The tableau builds down in alternating colours, an empty fan may be filled by a King, and there is no reshuffle. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Box Fan?

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

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck.
• Foundations: four, each already holding its Ace before the deal.
• Tableau: sixteen fans of exactly three cards, all face up (48 cards).
• No stock, no waste, and no reshuffle.

Rules

• Only the exposed end of each fan is in play.
• Build fans down in alternating colours, one card at a time.
• 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.

Box Fan Strategy

Starting with the Aces up removes the family's usual opening problem and replaces it with a different one: every 2 is instantly playable, and playing them all straight away is usually a mistake.

• Bank the twos, then slow down. Nothing in the tableau can build on an Ace, so a 2 is never useful in play — send it up at once. From the 3s onward the calculation reverses: a low card on an exposed end is a landing spot, and the foundations do not give cards back.
• Sixteen exposed cards is your whole hand. Read all of them before moving. With three-card fans, the card you want is at most two moves deep, so the board is unusually legible — use that rather than playing the first legal move you spot.
• Kings are dead weight until a fan empties. A King can never be built on in this game, so every King sitting on an exposed end is blocking two cards beneath it. Clearing a fan so a King has somewhere to go is one of the few structural moves available.
• Empty a fan deliberately, not accidentally. Because only a King fills a space, an empty fan you cannot use is a fan you have lost. Line the King up first.
• There is no second chance. No reshuffle means the deal is the puzzle. When no legal move remains the game is genuinely over, and it will tell you so.

Box Fan in the Fan Family

Box Fan is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Fan variant. Its class does three things: lay out sixteen fans, build in alternating colour with a King base rank, and hold the four Aces back in the shuffle so they can be dealt straight to the foundations at the end of the deal. Forty-eight cards then divide evenly into sixteen threes, which is why this board has no short fan where every other member of the family does.

Founding the Aces first is not unique to it — Trefoil does the same to La Belle Lucie's board, and the shared engine's seed-stable lift is that game's, reused here rather than written twice. What Box Fan adds is the even division, and the effect is subtler than it sounds: with no short fan there is no single card sitting alone and instantly playable, so the opening offers sixteen equally weighted choices instead of one obvious one.

Its empty-fan rule follows PySolFC rather than the books' rule for the La Belle Lucie line, which says a space is never refilled. That difference is real and the catalogue carries both readings — see Ceiling Fan for the same King rule on the eighteen-fan board, and La Belle Lucie or Shamrocks for members that keep the stricter tradition.

One honest note on difficulty. No published win rate for Box Fan that we can reach carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally the free Aces help and the missing reshuffle hurts; it is a short game either way, since a board of sixteen three-card fans resolves quickly in both directions.