Salic Law Solitaire

What is Salic Law Solitaire?

Salic Law is a two-deck patience named after the medieval succession rule that barred women from inheriting the throne. The game enacts that idea literally: every Queen is thrown out of the deck before play, leaving the eight Kings as the immovable heads of eight columns. The remaining cards — Aces through Jacks — must be marshalled onto eight foundations that build up regardless of suit.

With no stock, no waste, and no redeal, everything is on the table from the first moment. What looks like full information is deceptive: only the top card of each column can move, so the order cards were buried during the deal decides almost everything.

Full rules

Two standard 52-card decks are combined into a 104-card pack. The eight Queens (two of each suit across the two decks) are discarded, leaving 88 cards in play plus eight Kings. The first King dealt becomes the base of the first column; each subsequent King opens a new column, up to eight columns total. Every other card either goes onto a foundation if it fits immediately, or onto the current column.

Foundations build upward in the sequence A → 2 → 3 → … → 10 → J, ignoring suit entirely. Each foundation holds eleven cards when complete. Because two decks supply eight cards of every rank from Ace to Jack, the eight foundations consume exactly 8 × 11 = 88 cards — the whole non-King, non-Queen pack.

During play, only the exposed top card of any column may be moved. It can go to a foundation that it extends, or — and this is the only tableau move — onto a vacant column, meaning one that has been emptied down to its King base. You win when all eight foundations reach the Jack, which is the same as every column being reduced to its King.

Where the difficulty comes from

Salic Law gives you exactly eight columns and, at the start, zero vacant ones — each is topped by a pile of dealt cards. Your only maneuvering space appears when a column is cleared to its King. Until then, a card you need at the bottom of a column is locked behind everything above it, and the single empty-column slot you might eventually open is a scarce, contested resource.

Because foundations build by rank and not suit, you are rarely short of a legal foundation play early on. The trap is spending vacant columns and foundation tempo on the wrong cards, leaving a low rank (often a needed 2 or 3) stranded under a tall column with no empty King left to dig it out.

Two-deck patience game family

• Sultan — eight foundations surrounding the Sultan King of Hearts, built to the Queen
• Gargantua — two-deck Klondike with nine columns and eight foundations
• Lady of the Manor — two-deck foundations built regardless of suit
• Big Ben — clock-face foundations built by suit from a two-deck pack

Reference and related guides

• Salic Law strategy guide
• Sultan strategy guide
• All solitaire variants
• Solitaire glossary