The game everyone means by solitaire. Seven columns, four foundations, and one deck. What is different here is which deals you are given, and why we can say what we say about them.
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Twenty-eight cards go into seven columns, only the last of each showing. You build downward in alternating colours, move Kings into empty columns, and send Aces up to the four foundations to build each suit back up to its King. Get all fifty-two home and you have won.
What you cannot see is the difficulty. Twenty-one of the twenty-eight cards start face down, and the stock holds the rest.
| Cards in play | 52 |
|---|---|
| Columns | 7 |
| Cards dealt to the columns | 28 |
| Of those, face down | 21 |
| Foundations to fill | 4 |
This is a rules choice and it sits on its own, separate from difficulty, because it is a different game rather than a harder one. Draw one turns a single card from the stock and puts almost everything within reach. Draw three turns them in threes, so only every third card is playable and the order of the stock starts to matter enormously.
We kept it separate on purpose. Folding it into a difficulty setting would have taken a choice away from you rather than added one.
Relaxed only deals you hands that have actually been won. Not hands where a computer with perfect information proved a win exists somewhere, but hands a reference player who cannot see a single face-down card played out and won.
That distinction is the whole point, and we learned it the hard way. The tier used to mean the first thing. A solver sees through the table, so “a win exists” really means “a win exists for somebody who already knows where everything is.” Measured against a competent player who could not see the hidden cards, only thirteen of thirty of those solver-approved draw-one deals were won, and four of thirty at draw three. The setting was serving hands that are lost six times in seven while advertising the opposite.
So the test was replaced with a constructive one. A blind reference player has to actually win the deal before you are offered it. It is a stronger promise than the old one, it is honest about what it covers, and it happens to be about forty times cheaper to check.
A level here is not a cleverer opponent, because there is no opponent. It changes which deals you are given, what the rules allow, and how much help you get. Standard and Strict tighten how many times you may turn the waste back over and whether a card may come back down off a foundation once you have played it up.
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