In Glencoe, a Five or Six is dead until a Queen of its own suit is showing.
Glencoe is Intrigue with one extra lock. The eight Queens still anchor eight columns and the 96 other cards still split into eight Five-piles running 5 → 4 → 3 → 2 → A → K and eight Six-piles running 6 → 7 → 8 → 9 → 10 → J. The twist: a Five can only open a pile over a Queen of its own suit, and the same goes for every Six. Building after the starter ignores suit entirely — so the entire game hinges on getting the right Queen and the right starter to meet.
Last updated: June 2026
The suit lock applies only to the starter — and that is everything
Read the rule precisely, because the whole plan turns on it. The only card whose suit matters is the Five that opens a Five-pile and the Six that opens a Six-pile. A heart Five must land over a heart Queen; a heart Six must land over a heart Queen. Once that starter is down, the Four, Three, Two, Ace and King that follow it — or the Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten and Jack — can be any suit at all. So the bottleneck is never the body of a run; it is always the single starter and whether its matching Queen is available.
That changes how you value cards compared with Intrigue, where any Five opened any free pile. In Glencoe a Five you cannot place is not merely waiting its turn — it is structurally jammed until a specific Queen surfaces. Treat an unplaceable suit-locked starter as a hard blocker, not a card that will sort itself out.
Each suit has exactly two Queens across the two decks, and exactly two Fives and two Sixes. Each Queen column hosts one Five-pile and one Six-pile of its own suit, so a suit’s two Queen columns absorb that suit’s two Fives and two Sixes — no slack anywhere. If a spade Five is buried beyond reach, there is no second home for it: spade Fives only ever open over spade Queens, and there are only two of those.
Track each suit as four slots that must all open
Because foundations are pinned to columns by suit, it helps to picture the board as four suit-groups rather than sixteen anonymous piles. Each suit owns two Queen columns, and each of those columns has a Five slot and a Six slot — four openable slots per suit. To finish a suit you must expose both its Queens, then feed each its matching Five and matching Six, then run the bodies down and up.
The practical consequence: when a suit’s first Queen is still buried, that suit can have at most two of its four slots open, no matter how many of its Fives and Sixes you are holding. Watch for a suit where both Queens are deep — that suit is your likely loss point, and the cards belonging to it will accumulate on the tableau with nowhere legal to go.
Suppose a club Five sits on a column top early, but neither club Queen has been dealt to the surface yet — both are pinned under several cards. In Intrigue you would simply drop that Five on any open Five-pile. In Glencoe it cannot move to a foundation at all; the deal’s greedy auto-play will have left it in the tableau precisely because no club Queen could receive it. Your job is to dig out a club Queen, not to find some other pile for the Five — there is no other pile.
Surfacing the right Queen is often the real objective
In many deals the cards that matter most are not Fives or Sixes at all — they are the Queens still buried under tableau cards. A Queen that is dealt as a column base is free immediately, but the deal only makes eight columns; any Queen that arrives after eight columns already exist would park on a column top, and the matching starters behind it stay locked. Identify early which suits have a Queen stuck on a column top versus safely seated as a base.
When you can choose which column to peel down with foundation plays, favour the line that exposes a Queen-topped or starter-topped column for a suit whose slots are still closed. Freeing a buried diamond Queen can unlock a diamond Five and a diamond Six in one stroke, which then lets long bodies cascade — far more valuable than squeezing one extra card onto an already-open pile.
A Four that fits an open Five-pile now will still fit in five moves. A buried club Queen, by contrast, may become permanently unreachable if you spend your only vacancy elsewhere. Spend effort on the lock, not the card that is already free to move.
The vacant Queen column: use it on a starter or a Queen
Glencoe keeps Intrigue’s single tableau-to-tableau move: a column emptied to its lone Queen is vacant and can accept any one top card. With the suit lock in force, the two best uses of that vacancy are almost always (1) lifting a suit-locked Five or Six off another column so the cards beneath it — possibly a needed Queen — come into reach, or (2) lifting the blocker sitting directly on top of a buried Queen.
Be deliberate about which. Parking a card the moment a column empties is the classic waste: the instant a card lands on a vacant Queen it is stuck there until a foundation wants it, and a wrongly chosen suit-locked starter parked on a Queen of the wrong suit is just as frozen as it was before. Hold the vacancy open until you can see exactly which lift opens the most slots.
A heart Queen sits on a column top with a single black Seven on top of it; meanwhile two heart Fives are stranded elsewhere. Park that Seven onto a vacant column. The heart Queen is now the column top — and once it becomes a base-equivalent host (or you continue peeling to a true vacancy), the heart Fives finally have a legal home, and behind them their whole 4-3-2-A-K bodies can run regardless of suit.
Sequencing a turn under the suit lock
Glencoe gives you Undo, but a sound line is one you would play without it. Before committing:
- Open a locked suit before chasing free points.A suit with both Queens exposed and both starters placed is healthy; a suit with a buried Queen is the one to work. Spend moves exposing that suit’s Queen or its starter rather than padding an already open pile.
- Do not park a starter onto the wrong suit’s Queen. A spade Six dropped onto a vacant heart Queen is no closer to founding — it can only open over a spade Queen. Park it only if doing so frees something genuinely valuable beneath it.
- Mind the bodies that ignore suit. Because the 4-3-2-A-K and 7-8-9-10-J runs accept any suit once a pile is open, a single opened pile can absorb a long cascade. Prioritise opening piles over feeding them, since the feeding tends to follow for free.
- Hold the vacancy for the worst lock. If one column, once emptied, exposes a Queen or starter for a fully closed suit, steer your foundation plays to peel that column even if a faster point sits elsewhere.
Where Glencoe games are lost
- Both of a suit’s Queens buried deep. The signature Glencoe loss: a suit whose two Queens are pinned under tableau cards, so its two Fives and two Sixes can never open and its low and high cards jam the board. Spot this shape early and aim your only vacancy at it.
- A suit-locked starter pinned under its own followers. A heart Five trapped beneath the Fours, Threes and Twos that want to sit on it, with no heart Queen open and no vacancy to dig — nothing recycles, so the run never starts.
- Spending the vacancy on a card that was already mobile. Parking a body card that any open pile would have taken anyway wastes the one lever you have for breaking a suit lock. Reserve the vacancy for starters and Queens.
- Two locked columns and no vacancy. When two columns are each capped by a suit-locked starter whose Queen is unavailable, and you have no empty column, no legal play frees them. With no stock to recycle, accept the dead end and restart.