Australian Patience

Australian Patience is a patience, or solitaire, card game that comes from Australia, where some players prefer it as a harder alternative to better-known games such as Klondike. It is played with a standard fifty-two card pack. The player deals a tableau of twenty-eight face-up cards in seven overlapping columns of four, keeps the remaining twenty-four cards as a face-down draw pile, and sets up four empty foundation piles. The aim is to build every card onto the foundations by suit, beginning with the aces and ending with the kings. Within the tableau cards are built downward in suit, and any column of cards whose top card fits may be moved as a group onto its matching card, as in Scorpion. Only a king can fill an empty column. The draw pile is turned one card at a time and may be passed through just once, so luck matters, and the game is lost if cards are stranded in the waste pile or tableau. It can also be played competitively by two players, each with their own pack.