Cedar Solitaire
About Cedar Solitaire
Cedar Solitaire is the patience game your grandparents played, dealt onto a warm cedar table. A full fifty two card deck goes out across seven columns, and the job is to build all four suits from ace to king in the row of slots along the top. Cards come off the face down pile one at a time and that pile recycles as often as you like, so a deal stays alive long enough to be worth fighting for. A timer starts on your first move and your quickest finish is remembered on the device.
How to play
Drag a card onto a legal spot, or tap it once and tap where it should go. Tap the face down pile to turn the next card.
Rules of Cedar Solitaire
- Seven columns are dealt left to right, one card in the first and seven in the last. Only the bottom card of each column starts face up.
- The four slots along the top take aces first, then the two of that suit, and so on up to the king.
- Inside a column, cards stack downward in alternating colours. A red nine goes on a black ten.
- Only a king, or a run headed by a king, can move into an empty column.
- A face down card flips the moment the card covering it leaves.
- Tapping the face down pile turns one card onto the pile beside it. When it empties, tapping again puts those cards back underneath and you go round once more.
- A run of cards moves as a block, as long as the whole run is already in order and alternating in colour.
- The deal is won when all fifty two cards sit in the four suit slots. There is no loss screen, only a board with no legal move left.
Controls
- Drag a card onto where it should go
- Tap a card, then tap its destination
- Tap the face down pile to turn the next card
- Pull the handle at the bottom for table colour, card back and card pattern
What makes it worth playing
- Eight table colours, eight card backs and a set of back patterns to go with them.
- A timer that starts on your first move, with your quickest finish kept as a best.
- Card sizes are worked out from the width of your screen, so all seven columns always fit.
- A run of cards already in order moves as one block, so a tidy column relocates in a single drag.
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-09-14.
Tips from playing it
- Turn a face down card whenever you have the choice. An unknown card is worth more than a tidy column.
- Hold back an ace while you still have low cards of that suit to place, and send up the ones you cannot use.
- Think twice before filling an empty column. Once a king lands there it is not coming out again.
- If two moves look equal, take the one that opens the longest column first.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
We already had a card table on the site, and the build we started from looked like every other browser patience game on the internet. So we gave it a name of its own, a cedar and pine palette in place of casino green, and a serif headline that matches the rest of our card corner. The play is untouched, because there is nothing to improve about a deal that has worked for a century. We played several hands on a phone before this page went up, checked that dragging and tapping both land a card, and shot the pictures here during that session.
More on how we pick and fix these: how we make our own editions of classic games and how we test a game.
We wrote about this one
- How we make our own editions of classic games. A tableau of cards, a sliding tile square, four discs in a row. Nobody owns those rules. Here is what goes into turning one of them into a game that holds up on a phone.
- Category
- Card
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Landscape
- Players
- One player.
- Difficulty
- Simple to play. The pile turns one card at a time and recycles as often as you like, so a deal stays alive.
- Typical session
- Six to twelve minutes a deal.
- Last tested by us
- 2026-09-14
