Play Athena Solitaire — Klondike's Rules, a Squarer Board

Athena plays by Klondike's rules exactly — down in alternating colours, runs travel, Kings only in the spaces, one card off the stock, recycle as often as you like — and changes only the shape of the board. Instead of a staircase running from one card to seven, you get seven equal columns of four, dealt in alternating rows: face down, face up, face down, face up. The card counts are identical to Klondike's, 28 on the table and 24 in the stock. What changes is that no column starts as a free win and none starts as a lost cause. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Athena?

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

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck.
• Tableau: seven columns of four (28 cards). The four rows are dealt face down, face up, face down, face up, so every column shows two cards and hides two.
• Foundations: four, empty.
• Stock: the remaining 24 cards, turned one at a time to a waste, recycled without limit.

Rules

• Build tableau columns down in alternating colours: a red 7 goes on a black 8.
• A packed run travels as a unit.
• Only a King, or a King-headed run, may enter an empty column.
• A hidden card turns up the moment play exposes it. Fourteen cards start face down.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• One card off the stock at a time, and no limit on redeals.

Athena Strategy

The square board changes the arithmetic of digging. In Klondike the short columns are cheap and the long ones expensive; here every column costs the same, which makes the choice of where to dig a real one.

• Count in twos, because the rows alternate. Under every visible top card sits a hidden one, and under that another visible one. Removing the top card always reveals a surprise; removing that surprise reveals something you can already see. Plan two layers at a time and the board stops feeling random.
• There is no free column. Klondike hands you a single card in its first column, and clearing it is often the opening move. Athena gives you seven columns of four, so an empty column costs four cards' worth of work — expect to reach the King rule much later than you would in Klondike.
• Prefer exposure over tidiness. With fourteen hidden cards, information is the scarce resource. A move that flips a face-down card is usually worth more than a build that merely rearranges two cards you can already see.
• Use the unlimited recycle to plan, not to grind. Because you can cycle the stock freely, the first pass is a chance to learn the order of all 24 cards. Note where the Aces and Kings sit in the sequence; you will get them back.
• Know when the cycle is spent. Redeals being unlimited does not mean chances are. If a whole pass of the stock produces no legal move, another pass will produce none either — nothing on the board has changed.

Athena in the Klondike Family

Athena is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Klondike variant whose only distinguishing feature is its deal: four rows to seven columns, with the first and third dealt face down and the second and fourth face up. Every other rule is inherited unchanged — the alternating-colour tableau stack with its King base rank, the single card turned from the stock, and the unlimited recycle that is Klondike's own default.

The interleaved hidden cards are unusual in this family. Every other member with face-down cards buries them in a block at the bottom of the column, which is what a staircase does naturally. Athena alternates them, so digging never settles into a rhythm: you always know the next card down and never the one after it. In this catalogue only Interchange, from the Forty Thieves family, does the same thing — on a much larger and much crueller board.

Its siblings show the other ways the Klondike rules can be re-shaped. Westcliff also flattens the staircase into equal columns, but shallower ones with only a single hidden layer. Saratoga keeps the staircase and reveals everything. Trigon keeps the staircase and tightens the build to a single suit.

One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Athena balanced, and no published win rate for it that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally it trades Klondike's cheap first empty column for a board where no column is hopeless — which tends to make the early game slower and the middle game more even.