How to Play Pyramid Solitaire
Forget building runs and stacking suits onto foundations. Pyramid works the other way around: you are handed a triangle of 28 cards and you take it apart, lifting them off two at a time whenever a pair adds up to 13. The whole rulebook fits in a single sentence, and yet a clean win is one of the harder things to manage in all of solitaire, which is what makes earning one feel good. Learn the shape of the triangle and the one piece of arithmetic behind every move, and the only question left is which pair to take first.
The goal
You win by stripping the pyramid bare. Every one of the 28 cards stacked into that triangle has to come off, and the moment the last one does the game is yours. The pile of cards beside it does not need to be empty and neither does the row you draw into. Only the triangle counts. That single fact quietly shapes the whole game, because it tells you where to spend your effort: on prising the pyramid apart, not on grinding through the rest of the deck for its own sake.
How the pyramid is dealt
Twenty eight cards are dealt face up into a pyramid of 7 rows, 1 card in the top row, 2 in the next, on down to 7 along the base. Each card is laid so that it half covers the 2 cards beneath it, which is the detail the entire game hangs on. The 24 cards left over sit face down in the stock to one side, with an empty space next to it for the waste, the small pile you turn cards onto as you go.
When a card is free to play
A card can only be touched once nothing rests on top of it. In the pyramid that means the 2 cards directly below it have both gone. At the very start only the 7 cards along the bottom row are free, since every card higher up is pinned by the pair sitting beneath it. Clear those 2 and the card above opens up. The pyramid comes apart in that order, layer feeding into layer, and the whole puzzle is really about the sequence in which you unpin it.
Whatever is sitting on top of the waste counts as free too, ready to match against the triangle. That gives you 2 sources of cards to work with at any moment: the exposed faces around the lower edge of the pyramid, and whatever you have most recently turned up beside it.
The pairs that add up to 13
Here is the one rule that drives everything. Any 2 free cards whose ranks total 13 come off together. The Ace counts as 1, the Jack as 11, the Queen as 12, and the suit never matters, so a red five pairs with a black eight just as happily as 2 cards of the same color. The full set of pairings is short enough to learn in a minute:
- Ace and Queen
- Two and Jack
- Three and Ten
- Four and Nine
- Five and Eight
- Six and Seven
The King is the exception, because a King is already worth 13 on its own. It needs no partner and leaves the table by itself the instant it is free. That makes Kings the easiest cards to be rid of and, as you will see, cards you want gone quickly rather than left to clog the pyramid.
The stock and its single pass
When the cards on show stop giving you a pair, you turn over the stock. Each tap moves one card onto the waste face up, where its rank is ready to match against the pyramid. The card underneath it in the stock is next, and so on down the pile.
The stock here runs once. Twenty four cards come over one at a time, and when the last of them has been turned there is no gathering them up to go again. That makes every draw a decision rather than a reflex. A card you flip past and fail to use is not coming back, so the stock is less a safety net than a set of 24 single chances you have to spend in the right order.
Why Pyramid is hard to win
Most people meet Pyramid expecting something light and come away surprised at how often it stalls. With an ordinary shuffle and a single pass, only a small fraction of deals can be cleared at all, which puts it among the toughest of the common solitaires. The reason is the way the triangle locks. A card high in the pyramid waits on 2 below it, and each of those waits on 2 more, so freeing one buried card can mean clearing a whole little wedge of the pyramid first, in the one order that happens to work.
Worse are the deadlocks that no order can solve. Picture a seven that can only leave with a six, while the only sixes able to reach it are trapped further down under that very seven. The cards point at each other and neither can move. None of that is your fault when it happens on a raw shuffle; it was sealed the moment the cards fell. The deals on this site sidestep the problem, because each one is checked by a computer for a solution before it ever reaches your screen, so a Pyramid you lose here was winnable and the line was there to be found. If that distinction interests you, it is the whole subject of is solitaire winnable.
Playing to win
Because so much rides on order, Pyramid rewards a good look before you lift anything. A few specific habits are what stand between a pyramid you clear and one that jams with cards still stacked up top.
Open the middle before the edges
A card sitting in the middle of a row holds down 2 cards above it, while a card at either end of a row holds down only one. Clearing the middle of the lower rows first therefore frees more of the pyramid for the same move, and more free cards means more pairs to choose between later.
Take Kings as soon as they come free
A King costs you nothing to remove and gives you nothing by staying, so there is never a reason to leave one in place blocking the cards under it. Clear them on sight.
Know where the matching cards are
Each rank pairs with just one other rank, and there are only 4 of each in the deck. Before you commit, glance at where a card's possible partners are lying. If the cards that could clear a spot are all buried beneath the card you are trying to reach, that corner is heading for a jam, and it is worth working loose early while you still have the room.
Spend the pyramid before the stock
Every pair you can make from the triangle itself is progress toward the win, while a card pulled from the stock only helps if it clears a pyramid card. Since the stock turns only once, lean on the table first and treat each draw as something you are spending, not a move to make on reflex when nothing jumps out.
Look one move past the obvious pair
A pair that is legal right now is not always the pair you want. Taking it can strand the card that needed one of those two as its own partner a moment later. When more than one pairing is on offer, pick the one that keeps the most doors open rather than the first total of 13 you spot.
Common questions
What do you pair in Pyramid Solitaire?
Two free cards whose ranks add up to 13, in any suits. That makes the pairs Ace with Queen, two with Jack, three with ten, four with nine, five with eight and six with seven. A King is worth 13 by itself, so it comes off alone.
Can you reshuffle the stock in Pyramid?
Not in the version here. The stock is turned over once, 24 cards in all, and when it runs out there is no second pass. It is the stricter and harder form of the game, which is part of why every card you draw is worth a moment's thought.
Is Pyramid Solitaire winnable?
On a random shuffle, often not, since many deals lock in a way no play can undo, and it is one of the harder solitaires for that reason. The deals here are different: each is confirmed solvable before you see it, so the board you are given can be cleared once you work out the order. There is more on the subject over at is solitaire winnable.
How is Pyramid different from Klondike?
They share almost nothing beyond the deck. Klondike is about building cards down into runs and up onto foundations, while Pyramid is about taking a fixed shape apart by matching cards to a total. If you are used to Klondike, the hardest habit to drop is the urge to build, since here there is nothing to build at all.