Baker's Dozen

Thirteen columns, and no help

The name is the giveaway: a baker's dozen is thirteen, and that's how many columns you get, four cards each, every one face-up from the start. There's no stock to draw from and no redeal: what you see is the entire game. That makes Baker's Dozen an open patience, a puzzle you can in principle read all the way through before you move, and a good deal harder to win than it first looks.

Two rules shape everything. First, the Kings are slid to the bottom of their columns at the deal, so they never sit on top blocking a smaller card, but they're also buried, and you have to clear the three cards above a King before you can reach it. Second, empty columns stay empty. You can't move anything into a cleared column, so unlike most solitaires an empty space is dead ground, not a resource you can exploit.

How to give yourself a chance

• Free the low cards first. Aces and twos trapped under higher cards are your biggest problem, so dig them out early and get the foundations started.
• Look before you build. The tableau builds down in any suit, one card at a time, so plan a short run of moves rather than shifting cards at random.
• Don't bury what you'll need. Dropping a card onto a column can trap the very rank you were about to play. Check the column bottoms first.
• Since clearing a column earns you nothing, keep your attention on the foundations rather than on tidying the board for its own sake.

Read the deal before you touch it

Open games reward a slow start. Before your first move, find all four Aces and count the cards sitting on each. An Ace under one card is nearly free; an Ace under three is a project. Do the same for the twos, then look for the ugly patterns. The worst is a Queen resting on an Ace. A Queen can only move onto an exposed King, and Kings sit at the base of their columns, so that Queen is probably parked until her own suit climbs all the way to the Jack. A deal with two of those is close to hopeless, and knowing it early changes how boldly you play the rest.

Here's a small worked dig. Suppose the club Ace lies under the heart 9 and the spade 4. The 4 needs any exposed 5, the 9 needs any exposed 10. If two 5s are showing, don't grab the nearest one. Put the 4 on the 5 whose column holds cards you won't need soon, because everything under that 5 just got one layer harder to reach. Then walk the 9 to a 10 chosen the same way, and the Ace is home. Every dig in this game is that same chain: name the blockers, find each a landing spot that doesn't create a new blocker, and only then start moving.

Habits that lose winnable deals

The classic error is moving cards because you can. Every tableau move buries something, so a move that doesn't free a needed card is usually a small self-inflicted wound. Racing one foundation is another quiet killer. Push spades up to the 9 while the heart two is still buried and you'll run out of landing spots, because the middle spades that could have caught loose cards are gone. Keep the four foundations roughly level. And respect the one-card rule: you can't move a built run as a group, so every card you stack must later be unstacked one move at a time. Long tidy runs look like progress and play like concrete.

The finish

You're building four foundations upward from Ace to King in a single suit each. Send all fifty-two cards home and you've won. Baker's Dozen has a reputation as a fair but demanding game: a healthy share of deals are winnable, but only if you spot the order to unpick them, because one careless move can bury a card for good. The name has a history of its own. Medieval English bakers could be punished for selling underweight bread, so they threw a thirteenth loaf into every dozen, and card writers borrowed the phrase for this thirteen-column layout over a century ago. It still appears in patience collections alongside close cousins with names like Good Measure and Perseverance. Tap a column's bottom card to send it to a foundation, or tap it and then another column to move it across.