Baker's Dozen Solitaire
Baker's Dozen and its 3 relatives sit at the stripped down end of solitaire. No stock to draw from, no cells to park a card in, no reserve of any kind. You get 13 short columns laid out face up and one rule for stacking, and from there each game is pure planning, nothing hidden and nothing held back. They look spare beside the busier games, and they play harder for it. Below are all 4: Baker's Dozen itself, then the 3 cousins that each relax or swap a single rule, Spanish Patience, Portuguese Solitaire and Castles in Spain.
What the 4 games share
All four deal the whole pack into 13 columns of 4 cards, every card face up from the start. There is no stock and there are no cells, so the only places a card can travel are onto another column or up to one of the 4 foundations, which fill from the Ace to the King by suit in the usual way. You move a single card at a time, never a group, and the card you take is always the one at the foot of its column, the only one no other card is resting on. With the whole deal on view and nothing to fall back on, these are games of reading the table and finding the order, not of luck.
Baker's Dozen: the strict original
In Baker's Dozen you stack the columns down by rank and pay no attention to suit, so any six drops onto any seven, red or black alike. The sting is in the empty columns: clear one and it stays empty for the rest of the game, because nothing at all may be placed into it. That one rule, no refilling, is what gives the game its teeth, since the gaps you open cannot be reused to swing cards around. The Kings, by contrast, are handled for you. Every King is placed so that it comes off last, the traditional Baker's Dozen touch, so it never sits in the way of the low cards you have to reach first. With that taken care of, the whole game is sequencing: free the low cards and feed the foundations without ever clearing a column you will later wish you had kept.
Spanish Patience: the empties open up
Spanish Patience keeps everything about Baker's Dozen and lifts its harshest rule. Here a column you empty will accept any card you like, which changes the whole character of the game. A cleared column turns into a real work space, somewhere to set a card aside and dig into a pile, instead of a dead spot you can never use again. That single freedom makes it markedly gentler than Baker's Dozen while keeping the same build by rank underneath, suit ignored.
Portuguese Solitaire: Kings for the empties
Portuguese Solitaire lands between the two. It builds the same way, down by rank in any suit, but a cleared column takes only a King, the same way Klondike guards its spaces. So an empty column is useful, yet only when you have a King ready to drop in, which turns those otherwise stranded Kings into cards you can finally place somewhere. It makes a tidy middle ground, more giving than Baker's Dozen and a shade tighter than Spanish Patience.
Castles in Spain: build by color
Castles in Spain is the outlier of the four, because it changes the stacking rule rather than the empty column rule. Rather than building down in any suit, you build down in alternating colors, each card the opposite color to the one below it, just as you would in Klondike. An empty column will take any card.
The alternating color rule is stricter than free suit stacking, so even with the spaces open, keeping the colors in step makes for a careful game. If the red on black ladder is the pattern you know best, this is the most familiar member of the family.
How to play them well
With no stock and no cells, these games reward patience and punish a rushed move more than most.
Free the low cards early
Aces and twos trapped in the columns are what stall a game, because the foundations cannot get going without them. Work toward your lowest cards first, and send each Ace up the instant it comes clear.
Keep the foundations climbing together
None of these games gives you a holding cell, so the foundations are your main outlet for cards, and it pays to bring all 4 suits up in step rather than racing one ahead. When the suits climb together, the card you next uncover usually has a foundation ready for it, rather than turning out to be a middle rank stranded on the table.
Spend empty columns with care
Where a game lets you refill them, an empty column is your one work space, so think before filling it and try to keep one open when you can. In Baker's Dozen, where they never refill, emptying a column is simply a step toward the win.
Trace a line before you build
Move a card you cannot get back and you may bury the one you need next. With the entire board on show there is no reason not to follow a route through first, and the undo button is there to try one out.
How hard are they
None of these is a soft game. Taking away the stock and the cells leaves precious little margin, and Baker's Dozen in particular has a name as a stiff test even for seasoned players. The compensation is that nothing hides from you, so a lost game is a puzzle to take apart rather than a verdict on the shuffle. As across the rest of the site, these deals are certified, each one checked for a solution before you play, so whichever of the four you pick there is a way through waiting to be found. Whether a given deal can be solved at all is the theme of is solitaire winnable. And if you would sooner have a cell or two to lean on, the FreeCell variants are where to look.
Common questions
Why does Baker's Dozen have 13 columns?
Because 13 columns of 4 cards use the whole 52 card pack exactly, and 13 is a baker's dozen, which is where the game takes its name. Every column starts the same length, 4 cards deep and all face up.
Can you fill an empty column in Baker's Dozen?
No. In Baker's Dozen an emptied column stays empty for good. That is the rule its 3 relatives relax: Spanish Patience and Castles in Spain let any card fill a space, and Portuguese Solitaire lets a King fill one.
What is the difference between Baker's Dozen and Spanish Patience?
Only the empty columns. Both build down by rank in any suit across 13 columns, but Baker's Dozen never lets you refill a cleared column, while Spanish Patience lets you drop any card into one. That makes Spanish Patience the easier of the pair.
Are these solitaire games hard?
They ask for more care than most, since there is no stock or cell to rescue a tight spot, and Baker's Dozen is genuinely tough. Every deal here is certified solvable in advance, though, so the game you are playing can be brought home with the right order.