Pyramid Solitaire

Clearing the pyramid

Pyramid Solitaire has one simple rule (remove pairs of exposed cards that add up to 13) and all the difficulty lives in the order you remove them. An Ace counts 1, a Jack 11, a Queen 12, and a King is 13 all by itself, so Kings come off alone. Everything else needs a partner: Ace with Queen, 2 with Jack, 3 with 10, 4 with 9, 5 with 8, 6 with 7. Draw from the stock when the pyramid offers nothing, and remember the win condition is clearing the pyramid itself; cards left over elsewhere do not matter. The tempting mistake is grabbing every pair the moment it appears. Sometimes clearing a card early strands the one beneath it with no partner left in reach, and the whole board seizes up. Glance at what a removal will expose before you make it.

Your first minute is usually spent on the bottom row, since all seven of its cards start exposed. Look for pairs inside that row first: when two pyramid cards pair with each other, both leave the board and two new cards turn up at once, which is the fastest digging there is. Pairing a pyramid card with a stock card only opens one. That small difference, two exposures against one, compounds across a whole deal.

Count your partners

Every rank has exactly four cards, and every pairing is closed: the four 9s can only ever pair with the four 4s, the four 6s only with the four 7s. That makes Pyramid a counting game. When a 4 leaves the board with a 9 still buried, one of that 9's outs is gone forever, so keep a rough tally of the pairings you are burning. Suppose two of the 3s are already gone and a 10 sits mid-pyramid: that 10 can only ever leave with one of the two surviving 3s, so track where they are before you spend one on a different 10.

The habit pays most on your first look at the deal. Scan for the killer pattern: a card sitting directly on top of one of its own partners. A 9 resting right on a 4 has locked that pair away, because you can never free the 4 without removing the 9 first, and the 9 needs a 4 to go. If the other 4s are shallow, fine. If they are also buried deep, the deal is probably dead, and knowing that after ten seconds beats discovering it after ten moves.

Giving yourself a chance

• Clear every King the moment it is exposed. Kings need no partner, so removing one costs nothing and always opens the board. There is no reason to wait, ever.
• Prefer moves that expose two new cards over moves that expose one, and prefer pairing two pyramid cards over using a stock card when both would make the same 13.
• Dig evenly. Every pyramid card is pinned by the two cards below it, so a lopsided dig leaves a tall spine that only a lucky run of draws can rescue.
• Spend the stock late, not early. Those draws are limited, and the moment the pyramid stalls is exactly when you want options left in hand.
• Keep a mental list of dead ranks. A lone 10 with every 3 gone is a corpse on the board; plan your digging route around it instead of hoping.

A game of arithmetic and luck

Pyramid is an old patience, described in card-game books for well over a century, and it picked up an Egyptian flavour along the way. After Tutankhamun's tomb was opened in 1922 and Egypt mania swept through design and entertainment, pyramid-shaped card games fit the moment, and computer players later met a version called Tut's Tomb in one of Microsoft's Windows Entertainment Packs in the early 1990s. Unlike Klondike or FreeCell, plenty of Pyramid deals simply cannot be cleared no matter how well you play; the cards you need are locked behind one another from the start. That is part of its charm as a quick, low-stakes round. A game takes a couple of minutes, a fresh deal is one click away, and a win feels like cracking a small arithmetic puzzle rather than grinding out a long solitaire.