Two-deck patience
Two standard decks, all 104 cards face up. Eight aces start the foundations; the remaining 96 cards fill eight columns of twelve. Build sequences down in suit, move them as a unit, and fill all eight foundations from Ace to King to win.
Click a card to select it — or drag it to a highlighted destination.
Tableau is one of the most demanding open-information solitaire games. Two decks, deep columns, and suit-constrained building mean every move must serve a long-term plan. The sequence-move rule is the key mechanical hook: instead of laboriously moving cards one at a time, you can shift an entire run in one action — provided it is in suit.
Place cards or sequences on columns whose top card is the next rank up in the same suit. Empty columns accept anything. Each foundation builds up in suit from Ace through King. There is no stock, no waste, and no redeals — all information is visible from the first move.
Need more detail? Read the Tableau Solitaire strategy guide.
Tableau belongs to the Beleaguered Castle family of open-packer patience games, where all cards are visible and arranged around a central column of foundations. Unlike its single-deck relatives, Tableau uses two full decks, doubling the depth of each column and adding a second foundation per suit.
The game was documented in Rudolf Heinrich's 1976 collection Die schönsten Patiencen. Its close relatives include Little Napoleon Patience and Fürst Bismarck, which share the two-deck layout with slight variations in the building rules.
Where Beleaguered Castle lets you place any card on one that is one rank higher (regardless of suit), Tableau requires the same suit. This single change multiplies the difficulty dramatically: each card has at most one valid destination in each tableau column, rather than one per available rank.
The upside is the sequence move. A correctly built run of three or four cards in the same suit can be relocated in a single action, freeing the cards beneath it in one move instead of three or four.