Beleaguered Castle is a solitaire card game for one player, played with a single standard fifty two card deck. The four aces are set out in a vertical column at the center of the table to form the foundations, and the remaining forty eight cards are dealt face up into two flanking wings of four columns each, six cards to a column, so that only the topmost card of each column is available to move. The goal is to build every suit upward from ace to king on its foundation, moving only exposed cards one at a time onto a foundation or onto another exposed card in descending order within the wings. First recorded in a nineteenth century games compendium and a regular fixture in patience literature since, it has been compared to the later computer game FreeCell, since it shares a similar tableau without offering FreeCell's extra free cells, and it can be won with perfect play a large majority of the time.
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1. Beleaguered Castle (Wikipedia)
lead paragraph, player-count
Beleaguered Castle is a patience or solitaire card game played with a deck of 52 playing cards.
History
Beleaguered Castle is first recorded by Dick in 1883 and has been a regular feature in games compendia since then.
lead paragraph, game-type-category
Beleaguered Castle is a patience or solitaire card game played with a deck of 52 playing cards.
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