Play Ten by One Solitaire — Ten Columns, One Cell, and Nothing Hidden

The name is the board. Ten by One deals all 52 cards face up into ten columns — two of six and eight of five — and sets a single empty cell beside them. The tableau builds up or down by one in the same suit, one card at a time, and an empty column takes any card. Foundations run up in suit from the Aces, which begin buried wherever the shuffle left them. There is no stock, no waste and no redeal, so the whole game is on the table from the first move and every problem in it is a problem of order. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Ten by One?

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

Setup

• Tableau: ten columns, face up — two of six cards and eight of five (52 cards).
• Free cell: one, and it starts empty.
• Foundations: four empty piles. The Aces start buried in the columns.
• No stock, no waste, no redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns up or down by one in the same suit. On the 9 of hearts you may place either the 8 or the 10 of hearts, and nothing else.
• The sequence does not wrap: the King tops a run and the Ace ends it, so no Ace goes onto a King in the tableau.
• Move one card at a time. Packed runs never travel as a unit.
• The free cell holds exactly one card and refuses a second. Its card may return to the tableau or go up to a foundation whenever a legal home exists.
• An empty column accepts any card.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way. A banked card does not come back.
• You win when all 52 cards sit on the foundations.

Ten by One Strategy

One cell is a small budget, and the two-way in-suit build is what you spend it on. The games that go well are the ones where the cell is used and emptied several times, not the ones where it is used once.

• Treat the cell as a bridge, not a cupboard. Its real job is letting you take two cards off a column in the right order: lift the blocker into the cell, move the card underneath, then bring the blocker back down onto a new host. A card parked with no retrieval plan costs you the cell for the rest of the game.
• Look at the two deep columns first. Two columns hold six cards and eight hold five. The deep ones bury their cards one layer further and are the likeliest places for a stubborn Ace, so count their cover before you start anywhere else.
• Read every top as a pair of ranks in one suit. Building both directions doubles the landing spots, but the suit restriction halves them again. Before you move, sweep the ten tops by suit and ask which of your exposed cards is one rank away from any of them, in either direction.
• Keep the four suits spread across your column tops. If six tops are hearts and clubs, the diamonds and spades you uncover have almost nowhere to go. Spreading the suits across the tops is worth more here than spreading the ranks, because suit is the harder half of the rule to satisfy.
• Hold back low cards you still need as hosts. A 3 left in the tableau can host a 2 or a 4 of its suit. Sending it to the foundation is permanent, so bank it when the suit genuinely needs it rather than the instant it becomes legal.
• An empty column beats the cell outright. A space accepts any card and can then be built on in both directions, while the cell is a dead end until you unload it. With ten shallow columns, clearing one is a realistic goal and usually the move that decides the game.

Ten by One and Its Parent Bastion

Ten by One is catalogued as a direct descendant of Bastion, and it keeps everything about that game except the board. The PySol Fan Club collection builds it from Bastion with a single reserve, deals three rows to ten columns and then three more passes to the columns that still want cards, and — crucially — never deals to the reserve at all. That single line is the whole difference between the two games.

The result is a study in how far a board can change a game without any rule changing. Bastion opens with both of its cells full, so your first job is to unload one and buy some freedom; Ten by One opens with its one cell free and two columns already a card deeper. One game starts by asking you to spend, the other by asking you to save. The building rule, the single-card moves, the one-way foundations and the buried Aces are identical in both.

The wider family is the open tableau: Fortress shares this exact deal shape and the two-way in-suit build with no cell at all, which makes it the cleanest measure of what one square of storage is worth. Beleaguered Castle and Streets and Alleys keep the open board and drop the suit rule; FreeCell and Eight Off take the cells to four and eight.

One honest note on difficulty. No win-rate figure for Ten by One that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. What holds without a citation is a matter of logic: any deal of Fortress you could win you could also win here, because the shape is the same and the cell is optional. Ten by One is easier than Fortress by exactly what one card of storage buys, and no more.