Play Australian Patience

Australian Patience game info

• Family: Yukon Solitaire type games
• Decks: One deck (52 cards)
• Game time: Short
• Chance of winning: Medium (~20% of deals are winnable)

Goal

The goal in Australian Patience is to move all the cards to the foundation piles.

Deal & layout

There are 7 tableau piles, which are each dealt 4 face-up cards.

The rest of the cards go face-down in the stock.

Allowed moves

The tableau is built down by rank and by same suit. Any card in the tableau can be moved, the cards on top don't have to be correctly ordered. All cards on top of the moving card will be moved with it as a unit. This is similar to how cards are moved in Yukon Solitaire. Only Kings (or sequences starting with a King) can be moved to an empty tableau pile.

Click the stock to reveal a card, which is flipped and moved to the waste. There is only one pass through the stock, it cannot be reset.

Foundations are built up in-suit (by increasing rank).

Strategy

• The general strategy should be to bring all the cards from the stock onto the tableau (or move them to the foundations). Resetting the stock is not allowed, so a card might become inaccessible in the waste, resulting in a lost game.
• To bring a card from the waste onto the tableau it can help to reason backwards. Check if the card it has to be placed on is in the tableau and if it is available. Example: A ♥9 appears. It must sit on ♥10 (same suit). If the ♥10 is not free in the tableau, then you need to free it first. Reason backwards from the blocking card. Which card is covering ♥10? What needs to move to uncover it?
• Only flip the stock when necessary to avoid burying cards in the waste.
• Don’t make moves in the tableau just because you can. Only make moves that help with the overall strategy.
• Be careful with moves which result in higher ranked cards laying above lower ranked cards of the same suit. Sometimes it might not be possible anymore to free the lower ranked cards.
• Don’t immediately move a King to an empty tableau pile, especially if it doesn’t free up other cards. One of the next stock flips could have a King as well, which could allow better subsequent moves. Try to avoid burying a King in the waste pile.
• Normally it’s always safe to play a card to the foundation. It should also be safe to build on Kings that are at the bottom of a tableau stack.
• Check the initial deal for unsolvable deals. If the deal has a pile with e.g. cards 6-4-5 of the same suit without any other cards in between, it’s impossible to finish the deal. The 5 cannot be placed on top of the 6, and it can also not be moved to the foundation because the 4 is buried below it.

Similar games

Australian Patience is often referred to as a combination of Klondike Solitaire, Yukon Solitaire and Scorpion Solitaire.

There are a few variations of Australian Patience that increase the chance of winning a game:

• Canberra Solitaire: Same rules as Australian Patience, but allows a single stock reset.
• Tasmanian Solitaire: Same rules as Australian Patience, but allows unlimited stock resets as in Klondike.
• Brisbane Solitaire: Same rules as Yukon except building is regardless of suit, and the starting tableau is a bit different.

Developer

The implementation of Australian Patience on this page is developed by Solitaire Paradise.

System requirements

Australian Patience can be played in all modern browsers, on all device types (desktop, tablet, mobile), and on all operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, ...).