Rules for Easthaven

Family: Spider
Categories: Thinker's, Challenging, Rewarding
Variants:
Also Known As: Aces Up

Easthaven is a one-deck game that blends features of Spider and Klondike. With careful play you can win one game in ten, and perhaps more.

Layout

Shuffle the deck and lay it out in a row of seven piles of three cards each, two cards face-down and one face-up in each pile. These are the tableaus. Four foundations start the game empty. Keep the remaining cards in the deck.

Play

Tableaus build down, alternating red and black. Full builds in the tableaus are available for play onto other tableaus. Only Kings or builds whose bottom card is a King may be played to an empty tableau pile (except when dealing).

Top cards of tableaus may be played to the foundations. Foundations build up in suit, starting with the Ace.

Dealing

You may deal any time you wish, provided there are no empty tableaus that could be filled by moving available Kings to them. To deal, turn up seven cards from the hand and put one onto each tableau regardless of rank or suit. Usually you’ll deal when you’ve run out of other moves.

Goal

The goal is to move all the cards onto the foundations.

Tips

Don’t deal until you run out of other moves.

Try hard to expose face-down cards. To accomplish this, make as many single-build tableau piles as possible.

Build the foundations evenly: don’t play up a black 8 until you’re sure you won’t need to put a red 7 on it to make progress in the tableaus. (But break this rule if it is the only way to avoid getting stuck, of course.)

When you have a choice, try to restrict builds to just two suits. That way you may be able to empty both builds to the foundations. You won’t be lucky enough to do this very often, but sometimes it can save a game.