Card Games For Dummies. Barry Rigal
of the waste pile) and move it up.
You arrange the waste piles so that you can see all the lower cards in them to maximize your strategic planning.
Kings are exceptionally bad news in Calculation. They’re always the last cards to go on each of the foundation piles, and when you put them on the waste pile, they can easily block everything beneath them. In a strange way, it’s good to turn up kings at the beginning of the game — you can put them on the bottom of each of the waste piles or put them all together in one pile.
Figure 2-5 shows an example of the start of a game. Having selected your ace, 2, 3, and 4 from the deck, you start turning over the cards one at a time.
FIGURE 2-5: A sample game of Calculation.
Reserving Your Time for Canfield
Canfield is one of the most commonly played Solitaires in the Western world. People often erroneously refer to this game as Klondike, which also appears in this chapter (see the following section, “Striking Gold with Klondike”). To further complicate matters, Canfield is also known as Demon Thirteen in the United Kingdom.
To set up Canfield, follow these simple steps:
1 Place 13 cards in a pile, with only the top card face-up; this pile is called the reserve or the heel.
2 To the right of the reserve, spread out four cards, called a tableau, on which you can build by using the cards from the reserve or the stock (the remaining 34 cards in the deck).
3 Above the tableau, place a single face-up card, which acts as the base card of a foundation from which each suit will be built up.
The object of Canfield is to get rid of all 13 cards in the reserve pile. You get rid of these cards by placing them in legal positions in the tableau.
Take the remaining 34 cards, the stock, and work your way through them in threes, taking the top three cards at a time and flipping them over into a waste pile (make sure you preserve the order of the three cards). You have access to only the top card in the three, but if you use the top card — that is, you put it on the tableau or foundation — you gain access to the second card, and so on. After you go through the stock in threes, you turn up the last card out of the 34; this card is accessible. When the stock comes out in threes, you treat the last three cards as a regular group of three. If you have two cards left over at the end of the stock, you get to look at and use them both separately.
After you work your way through the stock, pick it up and start again; continue until you either finish the game or get stuck and can’t move any further.
As soon as a card equivalent in rank to the foundation base card emerges from either the reserve pile or the stock, pick the card up and put it in a separate pile in the foundation, above the tableau. You can build only the next higher card of the matching suit, and no other card, onto the foundation.
Take a look at an example layout of the start of a game in Figure 2-6.
FIGURE 2-6: Starting a game of Canfield.
You’re in luck! This layout is a very promising start. The ♣Q joins the ♦Q at the top of the foundation, in a separate pile. This move creates a gap in the tableau where you can place a card from the reserve pile.
CARE TO TAKE MR. CANFIELD’S BET?
The story of where the Solitaire game Canfield got its name is a good one. At the turn of the century, Mr. Canfield ran a gambling salon where he made a bet with his customers. By paying $50, the customer received a well-shuffled deck of cards to play an abbreviated form of the game that now bears Mr. Canfield’s name. For every card in the foundation piles at the moment when “time” was called (after three turns through the stock), the customer received a return of $5. The odds of winning the bet were heavily weighted in favor of the proprietor, but customers still flocked to take him up on the bet. The problem from the casino owner’s perspective was that the game required a casino employee to watch over every gambler who took up the bet, thereby reducing the profitability of the game.
The red 3 goes on the black 4, and the black 2 goes on the red 3. Another card from the reserve pile fills the gap in the tableau left by the black 2.
Striking Gold with Klondike
Klondike, frequently misnamed Canfield (see the previous section), is by far the most frequently played Solitaire that I know. You need only a little time and a little space. In addition, you have a good chance of winning at Klondike — you may find yourself winning half the games you play.
Klondike requires little tactics or strategy. It’s an ideal game for children, perhaps for that very reason, and I think that Klondike was the first Solitaire that I ever played. Klondike is also an