Baker's Dozen Solitaire

TSBy The Strategy Desk·Published April 5, 2026

Baker's Dozen is a classic patience card game with a unique twist: before play begins, all Kings are moved to the bottom of their columns. With 13 columns of 4 cards each, all face-up, you build tableau columns down regardless of suit and foundations up by suit from Ace to King.

How Baker's Dozen Works

Deal all 52 cards face-up into 13 columns of 4 cards each. Move any Kings to the bottom of their columns. Build tableau columns down regardless of suit — place a 5♥ on a 6♠, a 3♣ on a 4♦, etc. Only the top card of each column can move. Build foundations up by suit from Ace to King. Empty columns cannot be filled. Win by moving all 52 cards to the four foundations.

The Kings-to-Bottom Rule

The signature mechanic of Baker's Dozen is the Kings-to-bottom setup rule. After dealing, any King found in the tableau is moved to the bottom of its column. This prevents Kings from blocking other cards — since you build down, a King on top would be permanently stuck (there's no higher card to place it on, and empty columns can't be filled). Kings naturally work their way to foundations last, so burying them at the bottom keeps the game flowing.

History & Origins

Baker's Dozen is a closed-information patience that first appeared in nineteenth-century compilations under that name — a nod to the colloquial English phrase for thirteen, and to the thirteen tableau columns that define the layout. Every card faces upward from the first deal; nothing is hidden, nothing is drawn. There is no stock, no waste pile, no redeal mechanism of any kind. The only structural accommodation the game offers is the kings-to- bottom opening move, which lifts each king down to the floor of its column so the build-down rule has somewhere to go. That single concession is all the help Baker's Dozen will ever give us. Because the whole deck is visible from move one, the game was historically marketed as a pure skill patience — a contest between the player and the shuffle, with no luck of the draw to blame for a loss. Modern solitaire suites inherited it wholesale, and the rules have stayed essentially fixed for more than a century.

Strategic Principles

Baker's Dozen punishes improvisation. With no stock to draw from and no redeal to fall back on, every move is final and every column is a puzzle to solve in isolation. We begin each game by scanning the board for ace burial: where does each ace sit in its column, and how many ranks stand above it? An ace trapped beneath a 2, a 3, and a 4 of unhelpful suits may already be unrecoverable. If we spot two or more aces buried behind genuinely immovable cards, we should assume the game is lost before we even place our first move.

For the aces we can rescue, the order in which we rescue them is everything. A common trap is to chase the easiest ace first — the one on top of its column — and consume tableau space clearing cards that could have served a harder ace. We plan in reverse: identify the deepest buried ace, map out the precise sequence of moves that exposes it, and then see whether the easier aces can be lifted without disturbing that plan. If the plan holds, we execute it. If it collides with other rescues, we revise.

Empty columns are tempting but rarely worth the cost. Because nothing can refill an empty slot, clearing a column simply deletes four cards' worth of staging space from the board. We empty a column only when the final card of that column is an ace or a 2 we need on the foundation, or when emptying unlocks a long cascade of foundation plays we have already worked out. The “store a card in an empty column for later” idea that works in FreeCell does not work here: there is no later, only the remaining buried stack.

The final principle is any-suit build discipline. Because we can stack a red six on a black seven on a red eight, we have far more landing spots than same-suit patiences — but the legal moves multiply quickly and can obscure which moves are actually productive. We filter every candidate move through one question: does this move, or the chain it enables, uncover a card we need for the foundations? If the answer is no, we do not make the move.

Difficulty & Win Rate

Baker's Dozen lands in the middle of the patience difficulty curve. Published solver analyses report theoretical win rates around thirty-five to forty percent under optimal play, with human players in the twenty-to-thirty percent range once they have internalized the ace-burial heuristics. That is significantly harder than Klondike or Canfield, noticeably easier than Forty Thieves, and roughly comparable to Cruel played without redeals. The difficulty is structural: because the entire deck is visible from the start, a skilled player can often determine within thirty seconds whether the shuffle is winnable at all. Deals where two aces sit beneath hostile cards simply cannot be solved, and the absence of a stock means no amount of patience rescues them. We estimate roughly half of all shuffles are mathematically lost before the first move; the player's job is to identify and win the half that remains.

Common Mistakes

The defining mistake in Baker's Dozen is chasing any-suit moves that feel productive but uncover nothing. New players cascade tableau builds for the pleasure of stacking without asking whether the chain advances a foundation. A second common error is abandoning the board reconnaissance step — playing moves before identifying buried aces — which leads to cheerful play during the opening followed by a locked-out endgame. A third mistake is emptying columns early in pursuit of “space,” a concept that does not meaningfully exist in a game without a stock. We also see players mis-handle kings: once a king is at the bottom of a column, it is fine where it is, and moving it for cosmetic reasons wastes moves. The last frequent error is ignoring foundation timing — players hold a 4 in the tableau for future stacking when the 4 should already be on its foundation, and the deferred move bricks the column above it.

How This Game Compares

Compared to Baker's Game — a name collision that confuses new players — Baker's Dozen shares nothing but the word Baker. Baker's Game is a same-suit FreeCell variant with four reserve cells and eight columns; Baker's Dozen has thirteen columns, any-suit building, and no reserves. Compared to Forty Thieves, Baker's Dozen is looser on tableau building (any suit, not strictly same-suit) but stingier on deck resources (no stock versus Forty Thieves' draw pile). Compared to FreeCell, the games are almost philosophical opposites: FreeCell gives us four cells and alternating- color freedom but hides nothing; Baker's Dozen hides nothing either, but offers no cells, no redeals, and no mercy. Against La Belle Lucie or Cruel, which compensate for difficult positions with redeals, Baker's Dozen is harsher — one-and-done. The closest cousin in spirit is Beleaguered Castle: both are reserve-free, redeal-free, closed-information patiences that reward surgical planning from the opening move.

Variant Notes

A few documented variants soften or sharpen the base game. “Good Measure” adds two aces to the foundation automatically at the start, shaving several moves off the critical path and lifting the win rate into the forty-five-to-fifty percent range. “Castles in Spain” uses the same thirteen-column layout but deals cards face-down in the first two rows, converting Baker's Dozen from closed information into hidden information and substantially harder. “Spanish Patience” allows partial sequence moves, easing the single-top-card restriction. Our implementation preserves the traditional rules: four cards per column, thirteen columns, kings bottomed at setup, any-suit descending tableau builds, only top cards movable, no redeals, no refills. Players who want a gentler on-ramp can try Baker's Game, and players chasing a harder same-family variant can explore Beleaguered Castle.

Learn More

• How to Play Baker's Dozen — Complete rules and strategy guide
• Baker's Dozen Strategy Guide — Tips and winning tactics
• Play Baker's Game — Same-suit FreeCell variant (different from Baker's Dozen)
• Play Cruel Solitaire — Same-suit building with unlimited redeals
• Play FreeCell — The classic free cell solitaire
• Types of Solitaire — Explore 20+ solitaire variants