Anthill: A solitaire card game

Recently I've been trying out a lot of different solitaire card games. One of them had an interesting mechanic, but was weakened (in my opinion) by some unnecessarily complicated rules. I made a few adjustments, and I'm calling the resulting game Anthill.

Anthill is based on Little Spider, as described in "The Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games" by Albert H. Morehead and Geoffery Mott-Smith. It simplifies the rules, while preserving the same general mechanic. The result is a game that’s simple to learn, doesn’t take up much table space, and is usually winnable with attentive play.

The game is played with a standard deck of playing cards (four suits of 13 cards each, ranked A-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-J-Q-K in each suit).

Method of play

Shuffle the deck and deal eight cards face-up. Lay the cards in two rows of four cards each, one row below the other. These eight spots will form the tableau piles.

The piles may be built up or down in any suit, even changing directions. To say it more clearly: you may move the top card from one pile onto the top of another pile, but only if the card being moved is exactly one rank above or below the card on top of the destination pile. (The ranking is not cyclic. That is, aces may be played on top of twos, but not kings. Kings may be played on top of queens, but not aces.)

Only the top card of any pile is available to build, but you can look through any pile to see the lower cards at any time.

After laying out a round of eight cards, perform any desired builds on the tableau. Then lay out eight more cards from the deck, one onto each tableau spot. Continue building and dealing new cards until the deck is exhausted.

Empty spots in the upper row may only be filled with aces. Empty spots in the lower row may only be filled with kings.

Deal the last four cards of the deck onto the top row spots. After the deck is exhausted, continue building on the tableau until the game is won or lost.

End of the game

The game is won when there are exactly four stacks of cards, each of a single suit and in rank order (either A-to-K or K-to-A). The game is lost if no more movements are possible (or, more broadly, if no more progress can be made towards the winning state).

emptyhallway

2022-05-07