Play Double Rail Solitaire — Five Columns Against Ninety-Nine Cards

Most of the Forty Thieves family deals forty or fifty cards face up and asks you to dig. Double Rail deals five. Everything else — ninety-nine cards — waits in the stock and comes to you one at a time, once. To cope with that, the tableau builds down by rank regardless of suit: any six goes on any seven. Runs move as a unit, and any card may enter a space. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Double Rail?

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

Setup

• Decks: two standard decks, 104 cards.
• Tableau: five columns of a single card, face up.
• Foundations: eight, empty.
• Stock: the remaining 99 cards, turned one at a time to a waste. No redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns down by rank, in any suit: any 6 on any 7.
• A packed run moves as a unit. Because suits do not matter, any descending sequence is packed.
• Any card may enter an empty column.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• One card off the stock at a time, and no redeal.

Double Rail Strategy

Five columns and a suit-blind build means the board can accept almost any card that turns up — the trouble is that everything you accept lands on top of something you may need next.

• Keep the five tops at five different ranks. Every card off the stock is a rank; five distinct tops catch five of thirteen. Two columns showing the same rank waste a fifth of your board.
• Long runs are the tableau's memory. With no suit rule a column can hold a run from King down to 2, and because runs move whole you can lift the tail of one onto the head of another to expose a card. Build long, deliberately, and keep the runs from crossing.
• Aces and 2s first, always. The foundations are empty and eight of them need an Ace. An Ace buried under a run costs you the run to recover.
• An empty column is worth a lot — but only briefly. Any card may enter it, so use a space to split a run at the point that exposes what you need, then fill it again before the next stock card forces your hand.
• One pass. A card you cannot place goes to the waste and, unless a later card lets you play it from there, it is gone. When you can play from the waste, do.

Double Rail and Single Rail

PySolFC registers Double Rail as a two-deck game with five columns, a rank build and runs that move, and Single Rail as the same game with one deck, four columns and four foundations — also known as Auxiliary Sequences. Both belong to the Forty Thieves line by their shape (an open tableau over a once-through stock), but they are its most stock-heavy members: the tableau is a set of rails the stock is sorted onto, which is where the name comes from.

Like every game in this family here, the first stock card is left for you to turn rather than dealt to the waste at the start.