Rules for Four Seasons

Family: Four Seasons
Categories: Simple, Small, Pretty
Variants: Kings in the Corner,Simplicity
Also Known As: Corner Card,Vanishing Cross

Four Seasons is a simple game to learn and doesn’t need much table room. We aren’t expert at it ourselves, but Morehead and Mott-Smith rate your chances of winning at 1 in 10 in their excellent and comprehensive book The Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games.

Layout

Place five cards face up in a cross formation; these are the tableaus. The foundations are in the four corners; place one card face up in the upper-left foundation as a starter. Keep the rest of the deck in your hand, ready for dealing into the discard pile.

Play

Top cards of tableaus and the discard pile are available for play onto tableaus and foundations. Tableaus build down circularly (so that King may be played on Ace) without regard to suit. Any available card may be played to an empty tableau.

The foundations build up, following suit. The rank of the first card played onto any empty foundation pile must match the rank of the card placed on the first foundation in the initial layout. (For example, if the first card placed on a foundation pile is an eight, then eights must also be played onto the other empty foundations.) Building is circular, with Ace following King.

Dealing

Deal one card from the deck onto the discard pile at any time. There are no redeals; when the deck is empty, no more dealing is allowed.

Goal

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

Tips

Sometimes you can move multiple cards from one tableau to another, by moving individual cards to other tableaus (especially empty ones) before collecting them all again onto the destination. Learn this trick; it’s important for organizing your tableaus.

When possible, empty a tableau by building its cards onto other tableaus or onto the foundations. Try to keep a couple of tableaus empty most of the time.

When possible, organize the tableaus in suit. Then you can occasionally peel off an entire tableau to a foundation, leaving the tableau empty.

Play most cards to the foundations as soon as possible. However, sometimes it is worthwhile to leave a card in the tableau, in order to empty another tableau.

High ranking cards from the deck should not be played to empty tableau piles. Leave them in the discard pile until dealing is done.

When dealing is done and the tableaus have been emptied as much as possible, peel cards off the discard onto the tableaus and foundations. Keep trying to maintain a couple of empty piles so that out-of-order cards in the discard pile have somewhere to go.