In Intrigue, the deck is split into two camps that can never trade cards.
Intrigue keeps all eight Queens on the board as fixed column bases and sorts the other 96 cards into two kinds of foundation: eight Five-piles that descend 5 → 4 → 3 → 2 → A → K and eight Six-piles that climb 6 → 7 → 8 → 9 → 10 → J. Because the two ladders never share a rank, a card that helps one camp is useless to the other — and that hard partition is what you are really managing.
Last updated: June 2026
The two-ladder split is the defining mechanic
Lay the ranks out and the partition is exact. The Five-piles consume every Five, Four, Three, Two, Ace and King — six ranks. The Six-piles consume every Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten and Jack — the other six ranks. The Queens are bases and move nowhere. There is no overlap: a Two can only ever land on a Five-pile, a Nine can only ever land on a Six-pile. Unlike a Klondike or Canfield where a card might wait for the right foundation, in Intrigue a card’s destination camp is fixed the moment you read its rank.
That makes Intrigue feel like two interlocked games sharing eight columns. Progress on the Five side does nothing directly for the Six side; they only compete for the same scarce resource — column space and the single vacant-column lever. Track them as two separate tallies, and notice when one camp has stalled while the other still has easy plays.
Two decks give exactly eight of every rank. Each Five-pile wants one Five to start and then a Four, Three, Two, Ace and King; with eight Five-piles you need all eight of each of those ranks, no spares. The same is true on the Six side. With no stock and no redeal, every copy you bury under a Queen-based column is a copy you must dig back out — there is no fresh supply coming.
Fives and Sixes are the keys that open everything
A Five-pile cannot accept a single card until its Five is down, and a Six-pile is dead until its Six arrives. So the eight Fives and eight Sixes are the most valuable cards on the board — each one converts a closed foundation into an open one that can then swallow a whole descending or ascending run. When you scan a fresh deal, find where the Fives and Sixes are buried before you find anything else.
A Five sitting near the base of a tall column is a genuine emergency: until it surfaces, the Twos, Threes, Fours, Aces and Kings that belong on top of it have nowhere to go and will pile up on the tableau. The deal’s greedy auto-play opens whatever Fives and Sixes it can reach, so the ones still stuck after the deal are exactly the ones you must engineer a path to.
Suppose seven Five-piles are open and advancing but the eighth Five is pinned under five cards in one column, and those five cards are all low ranks (Aces, Twos, Threes) that belong on Five-piles. They cannot go anywhere until a Five is exposed to receive them, yet the Five they need is underneath them in the same column. This is the classic Intrigue deadlock. Your only escape is a vacant Queen column: park the blockers there one at a time until the buried Five is free, then cascade the run back down onto it.
The vacant Queen column is your single lever
Intrigue has exactly one tableau-to-tableau move: a column emptied down to its Queen alone is vacant and may receive any one top card from another column. Nothing else moves between columns. So on almost every turn the real question is whether you are progressing toward a vacant column and what you intend to lift with it once you have one.
A vacancy is a one-shot relocation. It lets you peel a single blocker off another column — usually a high card that no Five-pile or Six-pile is ready for, or a card whose camp has stalled — and set it aside, exposing what sits beneath. The instant you drop a card onto a vacant Queen column it stops being vacant: that parked card now sits on a Queen, immovable until a foundation is ready for it. Treat the empty column as a key you hold open until you can see the exact blocker whose removal unlocks the most foundation play.
Parking a Seven onto a Queen when a Six-pile is one card away from accepting that Seven wastes both the vacancy and the tempo — you will have to wait for the pile to catch up before the parked card can leave. Park only cards whose ladder is genuinely stalled, so the parked card was going nowhere anyway.
Balance the two camps; do not starve one
Because the Five side runs down and the Six side runs up, the two camps demand different ranks at any moment, and the eight columns feed both. A common failure is pouring all your attention and column space into one ladder — racing the Six-piles up to 9 and 10 — while the Five side quietly suffocates because every Ace and Two you needed got buried under cards you were shuffling for the Sixes.
Keep both tallies moving. If the Six-piles are flowing on their own from column tops, spend your scarce vacancy on the Five side’s problems instead, and vice versa. The camp that is quietly stalled is the one that will eventually dead-end the whole game, because its cards keep accumulating on the tableau with nowhere legal to land.
The last card of every Five-pile is a King and the last card of every Six-pile is a Jack. Those are the eight Kings and eight Jacks, and they are dead weight until their pile has climbed or descended all the way to receive them — a King only goes down after the Ace, a Jack only goes up after the Ten. So Kings and Jacks sitting on column tops early are pure blockers. They are prime candidates to lift into a vacant Queen column, since no foundation will want them for a long time.
Sequencing a turn with no take-backs
Intrigue offers an Undo button, but a sound line is one you could have played without it. Before you commit a move, walk the consequences:
- Open a buried Five or Six before chasing easy points. A card that fits a foundation now will still fit in three moves. Spend your effort first on exposing a Five or Six that is currently jammed, because every blocked starter freezes a sixth of one camp.
- Do not strand a low rank. Aces and Twos only feed Five-piles, and a Five-pile must already be open to take them. Before burying or parking an Ace, check that some Five-pile is open or about to open; otherwise that Ace may have nowhere to go for the rest of the game.
- Hold the vacancy for the worst blocker. If you can see which column, once emptied, frees the most stuck cards, steer your foundation plays to peel that column down, even if another column offers a faster point right now.
- Watch the King/Jack tails. Do not waste a vacancy parking a King or Jack if its pile is close to completion and will accept it shortly — wait, and spend the vacancy on a card with no near-term home instead.
Where Intrigue games are lost
- A starter buried under its own followers. The signature loss: a Five or Six pinned beneath the very low or high cards that belong on it, with no vacant column to dig it out. Recognise this shape early and reserve a vacancy for it.
- Filling the only vacant Queen column too soon. A column comes down to its Queen, you reflexively park the nearest top card on it, and later a genuine blocker appears with no vacancy left. The empty column was the key and you spent it on a lock that did not need opening.
- Starving one camp while feeding the other. Race the Six-piles up and let the Five-piles choke on un-played Aces and Twos, and the board fills with low cards no open Five-pile can take. Keep both ladders advancing.
- Two stuck columns and no vacancy. When two columns are each capped by a card whose camp has stalled and you have no empty Queen column, no legal foundation play will free them. With no stock to recycle, accept the dead end and restart rather than shuffling around it.