Rules for Golf

Family: Golf
Categories: Popular, Challenging, Rewarding
Variants: Miniature Golf
Also Known As:

An unusual scoring system, where lower scores are better than higher ones, gives Golf its name. (And like hitting a ball with a stick, it may look simple at first but it has surprising depths!)

Complete wins in Golf are rare, but see below about “playing for par.”

Layout

Lay out seven tableaus fanned down, each with five face-up cards. Above them place a single face-up card to start the wastepile, which will fan right during the game. Keep the rest of the deck in your hand.

Play

Top cards of tableaus are available for moving to the wastepile, building up or down by rank. Building is not circular, and furthermore nothing may be built on a King. Cards are never moved among the tableaus.

Dealing

Deal by playing a single card from your hand onto the wastepile whenever you want.

Goal

The goal is to move as many cards as possible from the tableau into the wastepile.

Because this is a hard game to win, many people “play for par.” Count each game as a “hole,” and the number of cards left in the tableau at the end as the number of “strokes” you took to play the hole. Each hole is par 4, so par for nine holes is 36. Solitaire Till Dawn will show your statistics as your average score, so you can compare against par: an accumulated score of 4.0 or less means you’ve made or beaten par.

Tips

Aces can only be discarded onto twos. Before you start play, count how many Aces and how many twos are in the layout, and plan ahead. You want to have the Aces available when the twos are, and you want to have enough twos for all your Aces-don’t waste them by discarding too many threes onto the twos.

Jacks, Queens, and Kings are the same as Aces and twos, only worse because you can’t discard anything onto a King. So Kings can only be discarded onto Queens, and Queens can only be discarded onto Jacks. You must manage these cards carefully.

In all solitaires, it is important to expose new cards. In Golf, concentrate especially on uncovering Aces and twos, and Jacks, Queens, and Kings. It’s harder to move these cards, so make sure they’re ready to move when opportunity knocks.

Discard from longer piles first. An empty pile is useless, so don’t discard the last card from a pile until you have to.