Pyramid (solitaire)

Pyramid is a patience or solitaire card game of the Simple Addition family, played with a single deck of forty-eight or fifty-two cards arranged in a triangular pyramid of twenty-eight cards. The object is to clear the entire pyramid to the foundation by removing pairs of exposed cards whose values add up to thirteen, the value of the highest-ranked card in the deck, with jacks counting as eleven, queens as twelve and kings as thirteen and therefore removable alone. Only cards that are fully uncovered by the cards below them in the pyramid can be paired and removed, so the player must plan which pairs to clear in order to expose deeper cards before the stock of remaining draws runs out. Under the strictest common rules the game is difficult to win outright, with reported winning odds of only around one in fifty, which has made variant rule sets that redeal or reshuffle the stock a common way to make the game more approachable for casual play.