Double Solitaire

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Anyone who has played traditional Solitaire will appreciate the challenges presented by Double Solitaire. Basically, it is a showdown version of Solitaire that sees players taking turns and completing as many moves as possible.

Double Solitaire Game Rules

A game of Double Solitaire requires two players and two standard decks of 52 playing cards. Each player lays out their cards in the standard Solitaire format. This is the “tableaux” style with seven spaces, four foundation rows, a draw pile and a discard pile.

To lay out a deck in the traditional way, the player places seven cards in a horizontal line across the tableaux. The first card on the left is face up, and the remaining cards are all face down. The player now moves their dealing to the second pile from the left, laying this card face up on top of the single, face-down card and then places cards in the face-down position on the five remaining stacks. This process proceeds until 28 cards have been dealt, and each of the seven stacks is topped with a single face-up card. The stack farthest to the right will have the most cards, while the one farthest to the left has a single card.

The remaining cards become the draw pile, and are turned face down nearest the tableaux.

To determine which player goes first, the players just compare the value of the card in position one (farthest to the left) to see which is lower. If this is a tie, the position two card is used.

The players each make as many moves as are available during their turns, and when they have come to the end, they turn over the top card of their draw pile and place this all on top of the discard stack. The opponent then has their turn. Play continues in this fashion until a player has succeeded in moving all of their cards to their foundation piles, or until no further moves are available for either player.

The winner is determined by a count of the cards in all of the foundation piles, and the one with the high count is the winner.
To play a game, the moves are the same as standard Solitaire:

They are aiming to do two things: first they develop lines of cards descending in order but alternating in colors. Each stack must alternate between black and red cards, and must also descend from the King card and downward. For example, a stack that has a black queen can only have a red Jack laid on top of it.

They will next use the cards dealt to build foundation piles that rank from Ace down to King, and these will follow suit. The foundation piles are set away from the seven rows and must begin with an ace. The first card is always the ace, which is followed by the two and then ascends all of the way up to the king.

All of this is done by drawing cards from the remaining deck and laying them in a discard pile if unusable. This continues until the player makes all moves possible.