Tableau (card game)

Tableau is a solitaire card game played with two full decks of playing cards, laid out in an open display where every card remains visible to the player throughout the game. Cards are arranged on either side of a set of foundation piles, and the player builds descending sequences within each suit while relocating cards around the open tableau to free up plays. The foundations themselves are built upward beginning from the aces, again organized strictly by suit, and a hand is won once all one hundred four cards have been transferred onto the foundations. The game belongs to a family of similarly structured open, non-random-draw patience games that includes Beleaguered Castle, Fortress, Little Napoleon Patience, Kings Solitaire and Furst Bismarck, all of which share the same principle of a fully visible layout rather than a hidden stock and waste pile. Players typically find the opening position the most constrained part of the game, with the available moves opening up considerably as the tableau empties. The earliest documented description of the game appears in the 1976 German patience compendium Die schonsten Patiencen by Rudolf Heinrich.