You can play Solitaire Square online on Itch.io.

Rules

Objective

Fill the grid with 36 cards in ascending order.

Setup

  • You start with a deck of 80 cards numbered 1 to 80 and colored in a gradient from red to violet.
  • You start with a hand of 5 cards drawn from this deck.
  • There’s a 6×6 grid to fill out.

How to Play

  1. Drag a card from your hand to any allowed empty cell on the grid.
  2. Cards must follow placement rules—
    • Numbers must increase from left to right in each row.
    • Numbers must increase from top to bottom across rows.
    • You cannot place a card if it would violate these patterns.
  3. Card placement costs—
    • There’s no cost to place a card if there will be no cards immediately to its left and right.
    • Otherwise:
      • The cost is the difference in value between the placed card and an adjacent card.
      • If there are two adjacent cards, use the smallest difference.
      • If the cost is 4 or less, you must discard that many cards from your hand.
      • If the cost is 5 or more, you can’t place a card there.
  4. After placing a card and discarding its cost, draw cards to refill your hand to 5.

Game End

The game ends when the board is full or when you can’t place any card from your hand.

Examples

The first time you play the game online the 1 and 80 cards are placed at the edges of the grid; in subsequent games these cells are empty.

Playing a card immediately next to another card costs you the difference in discards (e.g., playing 31 next to 28 costs you three discards). 

Offline Play

If you want to play this game in real life, you’ll need to either make a deck of 80 cards or purchase one of these and use a subset of its deck:

Inspiration

Solitaire Square is based on a simplification of the co-operative game Tranquility by James Emmerson.

The source code is licensed under the Creative Commons, so feel free to adapt it as you wish.

You can play the game online here.

Want to design your own card games? For advice and design challenges, see How to Design Card Games.