Forty Thieves Solitaire

TSBy The Strategy Desk·Published March 27, 2026

Forty Thieves is one of the most challenging solitaire card games ever devised. Played with two full decks (104 cards), it features 10 tableau columns, 8 foundation piles, and a brutally restrictive same-suit building rule. Also known as Napoleon at St Helena, Big Forty, or Roosevelt at San Juan, this game has humbled card players for centuries.

How Forty Thieves Works

Deal 4 cards face-up to each of 10 tableau columns — that's the 40 cards that give the game its name. The remaining 64 cards form the stock pile. Build 8 foundation piles from Ace to King, one for each suit across both decks.

On the tableau, you build down in the same suit — a 9 of Spades on a 10 of Spades, a 5 of Hearts on a 6 of Hearts. Only one card can be moved at a time. Draw one card from the stock to the waste pile when you need more options. There is no recycling of the stock — once you've gone through it, those cards are gone.

Why It's So Hard

Three rules combine to make Forty Thieves exceptionally difficult. First, same-suit building means you can't mix colors on the tableau — far more restrictive than alternating-color games like Klondike. Second, single-card moves mean you can never pick up a sequence — every card must be moved individually. Third, the stock offers no second chances — once you draw through all 64 cards, you're done. Win rates hover around 5-10% even for experienced players.

History & Origins

Forty Thieves carries one of the richer origin stories in patience. It appears in nineteenth-century European collections and is reputedly a favorite of Napoleon during his exile on Saint Helena — a romantic attribution that historians treat with a healthy dose of skepticism. Whether or not the emperor actually shuffled two decks on that volcanic rock, the nickname Napoleon at St. Helena has followed the game ever since, alongside Big Forty and Roosevelt at San Juan. The “forty” in the name refers to the forty cards laid out in the initial tableau — four cards across ten columns — and the “thieves” flavor fits a game that punishes greed at every turn. By the late 1800s the rules appear in standard English patience manuals, and the same-suit building constraint that defines the game today was already locked in.

Strategic Principles

Forty Thieves rewards foresight and punishes speed. The first strategic truth is that foundations must match suit exactly — ace through king, spades on spades, hearts on hearts. Because the game uses two decks, we are building eight foundations, not four, and every suit needs two complete climbs. That means we should always ask which ace we are moving up: is it the first copy (we still need the second later) or the second copy (we can commit more freely)? Losing track of which deck a foundation card came from is the hallmark of a lost game.

The second truth is that the stock is a one-way trip. We draw one card at a time to the waste pile, and there is no redeal in the standard rules — once we turn the last stock card, what remains in the waste is what we have to work with. Every stock flip matters, which makes it tempting to rush through the deck hunting for a single useful card. Resist. Before each draw, scan the tableau for moves we already have. A card we skipped in the waste two turns ago is still useful, while a card we burn past now is gone forever.

The third truth is that long tableau runs win games. Because we can only move one card at a time (no group moves), building a tidy same-suit run on a tableau column is like paying rent in small installments — it takes forever to assemble but pays out all at once when we finally dump the run to foundation. Plan column builds deliberately: a 10-through-ace run on the same suit is worth more than three fragmented piles. Finally, avoid blocking your own foundations by playing aces and twos too early. An ace on the foundation is inert; an ace in a tableau column can anchor a useful run or absorb a stray two before we need to commit it.

Difficulty & Win Rate

Forty Thieves is one of the hardest mainstream solitaire games, and the numbers back it up. Published solver studies place the human win rate somewhere between 10% and 20%, with most casual players landing at the lower end. Strong players with disciplined stock management can push toward 20–25%, but breaking 30% over a large sample is unusual. The combination of strict same-suit foundations, single-card tableau moves, and a non-recycling stock means that a single misplayed draw can lock a deal beyond recovery — and unlike FreeCell, real luck is a significant factor. Some deals are mathematically unwinnable no matter how carefully we play. Treat Forty Thieves as a long-game ritual: a losing streak is normal, and a win should feel earned.

Common Mistakes

• Rushing aces up.Aces look useful on foundations, but moving them too early strips the tableau of anchor cards we need for building runs.
• Ignoring suit-matching needs.With two decks and eight foundations, we need both copies of every card. Moving a heart five without tracking where the second heart five sits is a silent killer.
• Burning through stock too fast.The waste pile is one-way. Every draw should follow a careful scan of existing moves; never flip a card just to see what comes next.
• Building short tableau runs.Because group moves are forbidden, a 9-8-7 run on column three only pays out when we can dump the whole thing to foundation. Short, fragmented runs eat moves and rarely cash out.

How This Game Compares

Forty Thieves vs. FreeCell. Both games have a reputation for difficulty, but the difficulty comes from different places. FreeCell is famously solvable (about 99.999% of deals have a solution), which means a loss there is almost always a strategic failure — the line existed, we just missed it. Forty Thieves has real luck baked in: the same-suit foundation rule, the no-redeal stock, and the 104-card draw stream make some deals mathematically impossible. FreeCell tests deduction; Forty Thieves tests patience and risk management.

Forty Thieves vs. Klondike.Klondike allows alternating-color tableau builds and recycles the stock indefinitely in most variants, which gives players many more chances to recover from a bad draw. Forty Thieves refuses both of those safety nets. Players stepping up from Klondike should expect a long adjustment period and a much lower win rate.

Forty Thieves vs. Spider.Both are two-deck games, but Spider’s tableau-wide dealing from stock and group-move mechanics create a completely different strategic puzzle. Forty Thieves is the stricter, slower, more deliberate of the two.

Variant Notes

Forty Thieves has produced an unusually large family of variants, most of which soften the base rules in some way. Josephine (also called Maria Luisa) grants one redeal of the stock, dramatically improving win rates without changing anything else. Streets uses 75 cards (three suits from each deck) and adjusts the column count, turning Forty Thieves into a shorter session game. Number Ten deals ten columns with alternating face-up and face-down cards, adding a discovery element that standard Forty Thieves lacks. Other well-known variants include Emperor, Lucas, and Deauville, each of which tweaks foundation rules, stock handling, or initial tableau depth. Learning the base game first makes every variant easier to pick up.

Learn More

• How to Play Forty Thieves — Complete rules and setup guide
• Forty Thieves Strategy Guide — Tips and winning tactics
• Solitaire Strategy Guide — Tips to win more games
• Types of Solitaire — Explore 20+ solitaire variants
• How to Play FreeCell — Learn the classic open-information solitaire
• Play Spider Solitaire — Another multi-deck solitaire challenge