Rules for Royal Rendezvous

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

Royal Rendezvous was added to Solitaire Till Dawn X by request. Good play gives frequent wins, and a win will reward you with the “royal rendezvous”: all 16 Kings and Queens face up before you!

Layout

Remove the eight Aces from a pair of decks, and place them in two rows of four each. Also remove four 2’s, each of a different suit, and place two to either side of the lower row of Aces. Four piles above the 2’s start out empty. These piles are the foundations.

Shuffle the remainder of the two decks. Below the foundations, lay out two rows of eight cards each, face up and not overlapping. These are the reserves.

Keep the rest of the cards in the deck. Finally, there is a discard pile to one side, which starts out empty.

Play

Build the foundations up by following suit, but each group of four foundations builds differently. The upper Aces build up to the Queen, finishing (if you are skillful or lucky) with twelve cards each. The lower four Aces build up by twos to the King: that is, they build Ace, 3, 5, 7, 9, J, K. The four 2’s build up by twos to the Queen: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, Q. The remaining four Kings are placed one each in the four empty foundations. Technically you can only place a King here after its matching King has been played to one of the other foundations; but Solitaire Till Dawn X will allow it at any time.

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.)

Dealing

Whenever you wish, deal one card from the deck onto the discard pile. There are no redeals.

Goal

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

Tips

Don’t play cards from tableaus to foundations just because you can. Every time you play a tableau card to a foundation, the empty space it leaves is immediately filled from the discard or deck. You want to fill the tableaus with low-valued cards, to keep those cards from being buried in the discard pile. So only play a card from a tableau if the top card of the discard pile is a low-valued one.

Higher-valued cards, on the other hand, can safely be left in the discard pile. You can unbury them late in the game, when the deck is empty and you can play your carefully-collected low cards to the foundations in order to empty the discard pile.