Play Elevens Solitaire — Pair to Eleven, and Park the Court Cards

Elevens is a single-deck pairing patience played on a three-by-three square of nine piles, each showing one card, with a talon of forty-three cards beside it. Two exposed cards leave together whenever their values add up to eleven — ace with ten, two with nine, and so on down to five with six. The jack, queen and king can never reach eleven, so they go instead to three slots at the foot of the board, one of each rank; the moment all three are filled the set leaves the game. Every pile a move empties refills itself from the talon at once. Clear all fifty-two cards to win. Also known as Eleven Away. Free in your browser, no sign-up, and it works offline once the page has loaded.

How Do You Play Elevens?

Goal: remove all 52 cards, in pairs that total eleven and in sets of jack, queen and king.

Setup

• Board: 9 cards face-up as 9 piles of one, laid out in a three-by-three square.
• Talon: the remaining 43 cards, face-down beside the board.
• Reserve: three slots below the board, for the jack, the queen and the king.
• No foundations and no building. Cards only ever leave the game; nothing is stacked on anything.

Rules

• Card values are ace 1, pip cards their face value, jack 11, queen 12, king 13.
• Click two exposed cards whose values add up to eleven to remove them both. The legal pairs are A+10, 2+9, 3+8, 4+7 and 5+6.
• Suits and colours are ignored. Only the value counts.
• A jack, a queen or a king cannot pair with anything. Click it once and it goes to a free slot instead.
• The three slots hold one of each rank. A second jack is refused while a jack is already parked.
• When all three slots are filled, the jack, queen and king leave the game together and the slots open again.
• Any pile emptied by a move immediately turns up the next talon card. The board stays nine piles wide until the talon runs out.
• You win when the talon, the board and the slots are all empty. You lose when no pair and no slot move is left.

What's the Best Elevens Strategy?

• Park a court card the moment you see one. A jack sitting on a pile blocks it completely — nothing can ever pair with it. Moving it to a slot frees the pile and brings a fresh card down from the talon.
• Count the pairs you have left. Each of the five pairing ranks has four copies, so there are twenty pairs in the deck. If three aces have gone and only one ten remains unseen, the last ace has one partner in the whole pack.
• Keep high and low cards in balance. Low cards only pair with high ones. A board showing eight small cards has almost no moves in it, so spend the tens and nines before they run short.
• Watch which court rank is scarce. A set needs one of each. If the kings have all been used and two jacks are parked in different sets, the game will stall long before the talon does.
• Slow down near the end. Once the talon is thin, a pile you empty may stay empty. From there the board only shrinks, so make sure the pair you take does not strand the two cards beside it.

A Short History

Elevens belongs to the family of pairing patiences that grew out of Pyramid, where the whole game is choosing which cards to take away. What sets this branch apart is the reserve: rather than declaring the court cards dead weight, it gives them a job. The jack, queen and king are collected as a set of three and discarded together, which turns twelve otherwise useless cards into a second thread of play running alongside the arithmetic. The idea proved durable enough that a whole line of games was built on it — Elevens Too changes only when the talon refills, Suit Elevens demands that a set share a suit, and Tens and Nines move the target sum and reshape the reserve around it. The open-source PySolFC collection, whose rules this version follows, records Elevens under the alternative name Eleven Away and rates it a game of luck. That is fair for a careless player; the choice of which pair to break up, and when to park a court card, decides a good share of deals.

About This Version

This Elevens runs in your browser — free, no download, no sign-up. Install it as an app on your phone or computer; once installed it works offline. Unlimited undo, statistics, and a daily challenge that gives every player the same deal that day.

Other Solitaire Games to Try

• Elevens Too — the same game, but the talon waits on the reserve
• Tens — pairs to ten, and a reserve that wants four of a kind
• Thirteens — pairs to thirteen on a row of ten piles
• Pyramid — the classic pair-to-thirteen triangle