Cruel Solitaire

TSBy The Strategy Desk·Published April 12, 2026

Cruel Solitaire is a classic patience card game that combines strategic same-suit building with a unique redeal mechanic. With 12 piles of 4 cards each and aces pre-placed on foundations, every move matters. When you get stuck, the redeal button gathers all tableau cards and re-deals them in groups of 4 without shuffling — giving you new possibilities without changing the card order.

How Cruel Solitaire Works

Remove all four aces and place them on the four foundation piles. Deal the remaining 48 cards face-up into 12 piles of 4 cards each. Build foundations up by suit from Ace to King. Stack tableau cards in descending order by same suit — place a 5♠ on a 6♠. Only the top card of each pile can be moved. Empty piles cannot be filled. Use unlimited redeals to unblock stuck positions.

The Redeal Mechanic

The redeal is what makes Cruel unique among solitaire games. When activated, all tableau cards are gathered from right to left (top card first), then re-dealt into groups of 4. The card order is preserved — only the grouping changes. Timing your redeals strategically is the key to mastering Cruel Solitaire.

History & Origins

Cruel is a nineteenth-century British patience, and its name is exactly what it sounds like: a warning from its creators to anyone who sits down expecting an easy afternoon. Victorian patience collections routinely describe Cruel as the sort of game you “set down and play ten deals to win one,” a turn of phrase that captures both its reputation and its hypnotic pull. The game belongs to the same family of Victorian tableau-redeal patiences as Perseverance and Phantom, and it likely evolved from earlier French réussites that used gathering-and -redealing as their primary unblocking mechanism. The design is intentionally unforgiving — no free cells, no empty-pile fills, and same-suit building that narrows the graph of possible moves to a pin-prick. Yet the shuffleless redeal keeps the deal alive long enough that skilled players can feel out recoverable positions, which is why the game has kept a steady audience across 150 years even as easier patiences have come and gone.

Strategic Principles

Cruel strategy is not about individual moves — it is about timing the redeals. Because the redeal never shuffles, the card order is a fixed sequence that you are regrouping into successive 4-card bundles. Our first principle is to maximise foundation progress before each redeal. Every card we can push to the foundation before regrouping is a card permanently removed from the cycle, which changes how the remaining cards bundle on the next pass. A redeal performed too early wastes the opportunity; a redeal performed too late can leave the board in a configuration the next regrouping cannot fix.

Our second principle is dead-end pattern recognition. Certain configurations simply cannot be recovered without cycling the deck — a Queen covering a Jack of the same suit on one pile while the needed King sits at the bottom of another, for example. Experienced players learn to spot these lock patterns and redeal immediately rather than grind out pointless moves. The paradox of Cruel is that playing fewer moves between redeals often produces more wins, because each redeal has more unplayed material to rearrange.

A third principle is asymmetric suit tracking. Since foundations build by suit, and tableau also builds by suit, the game tends to bottleneck on one suit while the other three flow freely. Identifying the laggard suit early lets us prioritise clearing its blockers before redealing — because any blocker we leave behind will show up again on the next regrouping. Compare this to FreeCell, where temporary storage forgives bottlenecks; Cruel never forgives anything.

Difficulty & Win Rate

Cruel earns its name. With skilled redeal discipline the win rate sits around 15%, meaning even experienced players lose more than four out of every five deals. Unskilled play drops that figure dramatically — beginners who redeal at random often win under 5%. The gap between novice and expert in Cruel is all about redeal timing, not tactical card-moving: the moves between redeals are usually forced, and the real skill is knowing when to stop making them.

We want to be honest: Cruel is not a game of heroic comebacks. Many deals are mathematically locked from the opening because the card sequence produces an irreducible cycle. The skill is recognising those deals quickly and accepting defeat rather than spending twenty minutes grinding through moves that cannot win. Embracing the loss rate is part of the game’s charm.

Common Mistakes

The biggest mistake is redealing too soon or too late. Too soon wastes foundation progress that could have been squeezed out of the current layout; too late produces a regrouping that is near-identical to the failed state. We also see players emptying piles deliberately, confusing Cruel with games where empty columns are currency — in Cruel an empty pile is just dead space until the next redeal, and racing to create one often leaves stranded cards on adjacent piles. A third frequent error is ignoring the laggard suit: players push two suits aggressively to the foundation while leaving the third and fourth suits buried, then discover that the buried suits now form the lock pattern that kills the deal.

A fourth mistake is random exploratory moves. Because the tableau is so constrained, there are usually only two or three legal moves at any point. Players who make a move “just to see” often burn an exposure they needed for a foundation promotion one step later. Finally, new players forget the top-card-only rule, attempting to move multi-card same-suit runs the way they would in Spider or Penguin — Cruel allows only single-card moves, full stop.

How This Game Compares

Cruel belongs to the tableau-redeal family of patience games — designs that use the gather-and-regroup mechanic as their fundamental tension. Its closest relatives are Perseverance (which allows alternating-colour building and therefore plays softer) and Phantom (which limits redeal count). Compared to the FreeCell family, Cruel is utterly different: FreeCell trades storage for solvability, Cruel trades shuffling for punishment. Compared to Beleaguered Castle, another aces-pre-placed game, Cruel is harder on a per-deal basis but more recoverable thanks to the redeal. Compared to Accordion, both games sit in the “intentionally hard” tier of patience, but Accordion has no redeal at all.

Variant Notes

Several named variants soften or sharpen Cruel’s edge. Perseverance is the alternating-colour sibling and typically caps redeals at two or three, producing a 25-30% win rate. Ripple Fan uses the same deal but arranges the twelve piles in a fan shape and allows empty-pile fills, which raises win rates considerably. Phantom lets you gather and regroup with a shuffle once per game, converting one of the redeals into a genuine chance event. Some household rule sets also allow peekingat the gather order before committing, turning the redeal into an optional move. The name Cruel is usually reserved for the strict single-move, same-suit, unlimited-redeal, no-shuffle ruleset — the one Victorian manuals warned their readers about. If you encounter a version that feels gentler, chances are you are playing Perseverance under a borrowed name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Learn More

• How to Play Cruel Solitaire — Complete rules and strategy guide
• Cruel Solitaire Strategy Guide — Tips and winning tactics
• Play Beleaguered Castle — Another challenging variant with aces pre-placed
• Play Accordion Solitaire — Compress-the-row patience
• Play FreeCell — The classic free cell solitaire
• Types of Solitaire — Explore 20+ solitaire variants