Rules for Patriarchs

Family: Quadrille
Categories: Two-Deck, Large, Long, Pretty
Variants:
Also Known As:

Patriarchs is another member of the Quadrille family, and is similar to Royal Rendezvous. Although wins are hard to come by, good play can greatly improve your chances. If you’d like Patriarchs but would like to win more often, try Royal Rendezvous.

Layout

Remove four Aces of different suits from a pair of decks, and place them in a column of four piles on the left. Do the same with four Kings, but place them to the right. These are the foundations. Shuffle the remaining cards and deal nine of them face up in a three by three square in between the two foundation columns; these are the reserves.

Keep the remainder of the deck in your hand. A discard pile starts the game empty.

Play

Build the Aces up in suit to the King, and the Kings down in suit to the Ace.

Cards in the reserves, and the top card of the discard pile, are available for play onto the foundations. Empty spaces must be filled immediately from the discard pile, or (if the discard pile is empty) from the deck. (Solitaire Till Dawn X will do this for you automatically.)

When two foundations of the same suit “meet in the middle” (for example when one is built up to the 7 and the other is built down to the 8), you may transfer cards between the two foundations. You may not move the bottom card from any foundation.

Dealing

Whenever you wish, deal one card from the deck onto the discard pile. When the deck is empty, you may redeal once by picking up the discard pile and turning it over to form a new deck.

Goal

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

Tips

Don’t play reserve cards to the foundations just because you can. Every time you play a reserve card to a foundation, the empty space it leaves is immediately filled from the discard or deck. You want to fill the reserves with cards that you don’t want to bury in the discard pile. Usually this means a card that you could play immediately if you wished to, or a card that can be played as soon as one other card is played. Try to keep at least one or two such playable cards in the reserves at all times; play them when a valuable but otherwise unplayable card shows up in the discard pile, to move that card into the reserve.

Cards in the discard pile that can be played straight to a foundation can usually be played safely, but be careful not to play one that matches (and therefore defuses) one of your playable cards in the reserve.