Play Blind Alleys Solitaire — Everything Made Easy, and Still Not Easy

Blind Alleys removes almost every restriction the Klondike family usually imposes. The four Aces are on the foundations before the deal. The columns are only three cards deep. An empty column takes any card, not just a King. Packed runs move as a unit. You even get a redeal. And yet the name is a warning, because with six short columns and thirty cards coming past you one at a time, the way a game ends here is by running out of places to put things — quietly, and usually earlier than you expected. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Blind Alleys?

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

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck.
• Foundations: four, and each already holds its Ace before the deal.
• Tableau: six columns of three cards — the bottom two face down, the top one face up (18 cards).
• Stock: the remaining 30 cards, turned one at a time to a waste, with one redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns down in alternating colours: a red 7 goes on a black 8.
• A packed run travels as a unit — the whole sequence moves in one go.
• An empty column accepts any card or any packed run. There is no King rule.
• A hidden card turns up the moment play exposes it.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• One card off the stock at a time, and exactly one redeal.

Blind Alleys Strategy

With this much freedom the danger is not being blocked, it is spending your freedom on nothing. Six columns is very few, and each one you fill badly is one you cannot easily unfill.

• Do not fill a space just because you can. An empty column here accepts anything, which makes it the most flexible thing on the board — and dropping a random Queen into it converts that flexibility into a blockage. Hold a space until it does real work: unburying a hidden card, or letting you shift a run that unblocks a suit.
• Move runs, and build them on purpose. Because sequences travel whole, it is often worth assembling a long alternating run in one column so you can relocate the lot later. That is the move Lanes cannot make, and it is your main lever.
• Bank the twos at once, and nothing else automatically. All four Aces are up, so a 2 is never useful in the tableau. Higher cards are hosts: a black 5 in play accepts either red 4, and foundations do not give cards back.
• Turn hidden cards early. Twelve of the eighteen tableau cards start face down. The sooner you see them, the sooner your plans are about the real board rather than a guess.
• Watch for the alley. The characteristic loss is a board where every column top is a low card, every space is filled, and the waste keeps offering Kings. If you can see that shape forming, spend a space or break a run to prevent it rather than playing on and hoping.

Blind Alleys and Lanes

Blind Alleys is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a descendant of the Eastcliff branch of Klondike: six columns dealt two rows face down and one face up, the four Aces lifted to the foundations before the tableau, one redeal, and the plain alternating-colour tableau stack that both opens spaces to any card and lets packed runs travel.

Its twin is Lanes, and the two are worth playing back to back. The columns, the build, the Aces and the redeal are the same, and the spaces are open in both. Two things differ: Lanes deals all eighteen tableau cards face up where Blind Alleys hides twelve of them, and Lanes permits only one card per move. PySolFC's own difficulty ratings capture the effect: Blind Alleys is rated mostly luck, Lanes balanced. Handed a free run move on a board this shallow, most of the interesting decisions collapse — and what is left is whether the stock cooperates.

The catalogue carries pairs like this deliberately, because a rule that changes how every plan is executed is not a setting. Emperor and Rank and File in the Forty Thieves family differ by the same single flag and play just as differently.

For the same shallow board with Kings-only spaces and no pre-founded Aces, play Westcliff. For the family's full staircase, play Klondike.

One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Blind Alleys mostly luck, and no published win rate for it that we can reach carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. What is structural: the free Aces, the open spaces and the run move make the game generous, while six columns and a single redeal make it short — which is a combination that produces both quick wins and quick dead ends.