Solitaire.City
Six by Six Strategy

Column one grows with every stock draw — manage it or it manages you.

Six by Six gives you a small but fully visible board: six columns of six face-up cards, and a 16-card face-down stock. There is no redeal, no waste pile, and every stock card lands on column one. The game rewards players who plan sequence moves ahead, protect empty columns, and keep column one from becoming an unmanageable tower.

Last updated: June 2026

Column one is the pressure point

Every stock draw adds one card to column one. If the arriving card cannot immediately slot into a valid sequence elsewhere on the board, it stays in column one and raises the pile. A column-one pile of ten or more cards is not automatically fatal — cards buried there can still be part of a valid sequence — but a pile that grows without any in-suit neighbors becomes increasingly hard to dismantle.

The best response to a difficult stock arrival is to delay the next draw and instead make two or three tableau moves that extend an existing sequence or open a gap. Only draw again when column one has room to receive the card productively, or when you have a clear plan for the incoming card if it is unfavorable.

Sequences are the primary lever

Unlike games where only single cards move, Six by Six lets you pick up and relocate any valid in-suit descending sequence as a unit. A sequence of five cards in clubs moved onto a receptive target clears five positions at once and creates a new, longer sequence at the destination. These large moves are what make Six by Six feel qualitatively different from card-by-card builders.

Before moving individual cards, scan for sequence-level opportunities. Two partial sequences of the same suit on different columns can often be consolidated into one long sequence, simultaneously freeing positions and extending reachable foundation candidates. The board tends to open dramatically after two or three large sequence consolidations.

Empty columns are worth protecting

An empty column in Six by Six accepts any card or sequence without restriction. This gives you a staging area: temporarily park a long sequence in the empty column while you reorganize the cards underneath it, then move the sequence back or onward once the target is clear. Without at least one empty column, deep reorganizations become impossible because there is nowhere to stage intermediate moves.

Once you clear a column, resist the urge to immediately fill it. An empty column is more valuable as a staging area than as a home for a sequence that could instead be built elsewhere. Fill empty columns only when doing so creates a longer sequence or unblocks an Ace.

Foundation timing and the hidden stock

Foundations build up in suit from Ace to King. Moving a card to a foundation removes it permanently, which means it cannot be used as a sequence base later. For low cards (Ace through 4), this trade-off is almost always worth it — they rarely serve as useful sequence bases. For mid-range cards (5 through 8), consider whether keeping the card in the tableau extends a critical sequence before committing it to a foundation.

The stock is face-down, so you cannot see the order of arriving cards. This makes playing for a specific stock card risky. Instead, focus on building tableau positions that are receptive to multiple incoming ranks and suits, so any stock card has a legal destination without growing column one.

When the stock is empty

Once the 16 stock cards have been dealt, the game becomes fully open: all 52 cards are visible, and the remaining challenge is purely a sequencing puzzle. At this point, pause and survey the board. Identify which foundations are closest to completion, trace which tableau cards are blocking the next needed rank for each suit, and plan a path that unblocks them without creating unsolvable tangles elsewhere.

A common late-game mistake is chasing the most advanced foundation and ignoring the others. All four foundations must reach King to win. If three foundations are at Queen but the fourth is stuck at 6, the game is won by unblocking the lagging suit, not by rushing the others to King.

When you are stuck

Six by Six has no redeal. If you have no legal moves and the stock is empty, the game is lost. However, “stuck” usually means “stuck without using undo” — most positions that look terminal can be avoided with earlier corrections. Use undo liberally when you recognise that a sequence of moves has created a dead end. Working backwards from the stuck position to identify the moment the position became unrecoverable is the most reliable way to learn from hard deals.

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