In Laggard Lady, the deal itself is rigged against you — and that is the whole puzzle.
Laggard Lady plays exactly like Intrigue once the cards are down: eight Queens anchor eight columns, eight Five-piles descend 5 → 4 → 3 → 2 → A → K and eight Six-piles climb 6 → 7 → 8 → 9 → 10 → J, all regardless of suit, with the whole pack dealt and no redeal. What changes is the deal. A Five or Six may only break out to open a foundation while the number of foundations already opened is fewer than the number of Queens on the table. Early on, when only one or two Queens have appeared, almost every Five and Six is forced into a column instead — and that is why you start in a hole.
Last updated: June 2026
Read the cap as a counter: started must never pass showing
The defining rule is a single inequality enforced during the deal: foundations started ≤ Queens showing. The very first Queen dealt is the base of column one, so at the start the cap allows exactly one open foundation. The second Queen lifts the cap to two, and so on up to eight. A Five or Six that arrives while the cap is already met cannot leave — it lands on the current column and waits.
Concretely, if three Queens have been dealt, at most three of your sixteen foundations can be open at that moment in the deal; the fourth Five or Six to appear is stuck in the tableau even though Intrigue would have played it. Because all eight Queens are usually out well before the last cards fall, the cap releases by the time the deal ends — but by then the damage is done and the buried starters are your inheritance.
You need all sixteen foundations open to win, yet the cap never rises above eight during the deal. That is fine: the restriction only blocks startinga pile, and only while the deal is running. Once dealing finishes the brake is lifted for good, so the ninth through sixteenth foundations are always startable in play. The cap’s only job is to bury more Fives and Sixes on the way in.
Find the trapped Fives and Sixes before your first move
In Intrigue you scan for buried starters; in Laggard Lady you will find more of them, and often deeper. A Five or Six dealt while the cap was full sits wherever the current column happened to be, frequently with several cards stacked on top of it afterward. Before touching anything, count how many Five-piles and Six-piles are already open from the deal and locate every Five and Six still sitting in the columns — those are the keys you must manufacture access to.
A foundation that never opened during the deal is doubly painful: not only is its starter buried, but every follower of its rank-ladder (the Aces and Twos for a starved Five-pile, the Tens and Jacks for a starved Six-pile) has nowhere to land until that starter surfaces. Those followers pile onto the tableau and tighten the squeeze. Prioritise exposing a buried starter over collecting an easy point elsewhere.
Suppose the deal opened five foundations and then a Six arrived while only five Queens were showing — the cap was full, so the Six dropped onto column six and three more cards landed on top of it before the deal ended. That Six-pile never started. The three cards above it are likely Sevens, Eights or Nines that wanted exactly that Six-pile. Your job is to peel those three off — one vacant column at a time — until the Six is exposed, start the pile, then let the followers cascade back up onto it.
The vacant Queen column is your only dig, and it is scarcer here
Laggard Lady inherits Intrigue’s single tableau move: a column emptied down to its Queen is vacant and may receive any one top card. Nothing else moves between columns. But because the deal handed you more buried starters and fewer open foundations, you generally have less easy foundation play to peel a column down to its Queen in the first place. The vacancy you do earn is therefore more precious than in Intrigue — treat each one as a single, deliberate extraction.
Spend a vacancy to lift the specific card sitting directly on top of a buried Five or Six, not whatever blocker is most convenient. The instant you drop a card onto a vacant Queen it stops being vacant and that parked card is pinned on a Queen until a foundation wants it. So park only cards whose ladder is genuinely stalled, and aim the dig at the starter whose release unlocks the most stranded followers.
If a column top can go to a foundation now, send it there and keep the vacancy for a card that has no foundation home — usually a follower stacked above a still-buried starter. Burning your one dig on a card that had a legal foundation play is the fastest way to dead a Laggard Lady deal, because the buried starter underneath then stays buried.
Open the closed foundations before chasing tall ladders
Once the deal ends the cap is gone, so every Five and Six you expose can immediately open its pile. That makes exposing starters the highest-value early work: each one converts a dead foundation into a live one that can then swallow a whole run of followers. Compare that to extending a pile already near completion — climbing a Six-pile from a 9 to a 10 to a Jack wins you three small placements but opens nothing new.
Because Laggard Lady starts with several closed foundations, the count of openpiles is your real progress meter early on. Drive it upward. A board with twelve foundations open and short is far healthier than one with eight foundations nearly complete and four still unopened, because the four closed piles are choking four ranks’ worth of followers onto your columns.
As in Intrigue, every Five-pile ends on a King and every Six-pile ends on a Jack — the eight Kings and eight Jacks are useless until their pile has run all the way down or up to receive them. In Laggard Lady these high cards are even more of a nuisance, because the extra buried starters mean more of your columns are capped by Kings and Jacks early. They are prime candidates to park on a vacant Queen, since no foundation will want them for a long time.
Sequencing a turn when the deal already hurt you
Laggard Lady offers Undo, but the deals are hard enough that a sober plan matters more than take-backs. Before each move, weigh it against the buried-starter map you built at the start:
- Expose a buried Five or Six over any non-opening play. A follower that fits an open pile now will still fit later. Spend effort first on uncovering a starter the cap forced into the tableau, because every closed pile freezes a sixth of one camp.
- Match the dig to the deepest profitable starter. If two starters are buried, prefer the one whose followers are most numerous on your columns — freeing it drains the most cards back off the tableau.
- Hold the vacancy; do not reflexively fill it. An empty Queen column is a key. Keep it open until you can see the exact card whose removal exposes a starter, rather than parking the first convenient top card.
- Balance the two camps. The Five-piles run down and the Six-piles run up, demanding different ranks at once. If the deal left the Five side with more closed piles, point your digs there; a quietly starved camp is what eventually dead-ends the game.
Why Laggard Lady is harder than Intrigue, and where it is lost
Intrigue is already an unforgiving game because the deck splits into two camps that never trade cards and there is no redeal. Laggard Lady keeps all of that and adds a deal that deliberately withholds open foundations, so you begin with more starters trapped and fewer tools to free them. Expect a lower win rate and longer digs; treat a blocked deal as a fact of the variant rather than a personal error.
- A starter buried under its own followers. The signature loss: a Five or Six the cap forced into a column, pinned beneath the low or high cards that belong on it, with no vacancy to dig it out. Laggard Lady manufactures this shape far more often than Intrigue — spot it at the deal and reserve a vacancy for it.
- Spending the only vacancy on a convenient blocker. A column comes down to its Queen, you park the nearest top card, and the real buried-starter dig is now impossible. The empty column was the key and you spent it on a lock that did not need opening.
- Letting closed foundations starve a camp. If three Five-piles never opened, every Ace and Two of those ranks accumulates on the tableau with no legal home. Drive the open-foundation count up before the columns clog.
- Two capped columns and no vacancy. With no stock to recycle, two columns each topped by a follower whose pile is still closed and no empty Queen column means no legal move frees them. Recognise the dead end and restart rather than shuffling around it.