Fan Solitaire
Like La Belle Lucie but the four Aces are pre-placed on foundations before dealing, and fans number 16 rather than 18.
Select a top card, then pick a highlighted destination. Redeal unlocks when no moves remain.
La Belle Lucie is one of the oldest documented patience games, appearing under various names — Clover Leaf, Midnight Oil — in nineteenth-century card game compendiums. The name is French and appears in English patience literature from at least the 1870s. It belongs to a family of fan-layout solitaires where cards are grouped into small face-up fans, only top cards move, and the game is decided almost entirely by the order in which moves are made.
The 52-card deck is dealt into 18 fans (17 fans of 3 cards, 1 fan of 1 card). All cards start face-up. Only the top card of each fan is available.
A top card moves to a foundation (suit upward, Ace to King) or to another fan (same suit, one rank lower). When a fan empties, that space is gone permanently. When no moves remain, pick up all non-foundation cards, shuffle, and re-deal. Two redeals are allowed per game.
Every fan-to-fan move buries the card below the destination top. Before making any fan-to-fan move, check whether the buried card can still reach a foundation later. If not, the move may be a long-term trap.
Foundation-first discipline: scan all 18 fan tops for direct foundation plays before considering any fan-to-fan move. Foundation moves are almost always correct — they remove cards permanently and never create new blocks.
All five variants are available from the Rules button above. A brief summary of what each changes:
A redeal shuffles all remaining tableau cards and re-deals them into new fans. Using a redeal too early wastes it — exhaust every legal move first. The fewer cards remain when you redeal, the better the odds of a useful new layout. With only two redeals available, each one is a significant resource.