Where can kings be placed?

Only in the four corner slots. Queens go in the middle slots of the top and bottom rows, jacks in the middle slots of the left and right columns, and numbered cards can go anywhere that is free.

How do I remove cards?

Pair two cards whose ranks add up to ten — an eight with a two, a seven with a three, an ace with a nine. A ten comes off on its own. Face cards cannot be paired.

Two ways. Either you draw a face card and every slot it is permitted to occupy is already full, or the board fills up with no two cards on it adding to ten.

Can I move a card once it is placed?

No. Placement is permanent for the rest of the game, which is why the decision about which slot to use matters so much. Undo is available if you want to treat the game as a puzzle.

Is this the same as the multiplayer Kings in the Corner?

No. The better-known game of that name is a two-to-four-player shedding game where you build piles down in alternating colours and kings open the corners. This is a single-player pairing game that shares the name and the corner rule.

Can every deal be won?

No. With twelve face cards competing for eight legal slots, an unlucky sequence of draws can end the game regardless of how well you have played. Managing that risk is the whole skill.

Kings in the Corner

A board of marked slots, a deck turned one card at a time, and two entirely different ways to lose. Kings in the Corner is the gentlest game on this site and it will still beat you regularly.

Click the deck’s top card then a slot to place it, or click two cards that add up to ten to remove them.

Players	1
Deck	One standard 52-card deck
Play time	4–10 minutes
Difficulty	Easy to learn, and easy to lose

How to play Kings in the Corner

The board is a grid of marked slots and it starts empty. The deck sits beside it with the top card face up. Your job has two phases which alternate: fill the board, then clear pairs from it.

Placing cards

You must place the deck's top card into a slot. Where it may go depends on what it is:

Kings only go in the four corner slots.
Queens only go in the two middle slots of the top and bottom rows.
Jacks only go in the two middle slots of the left and right columns.
Numbered cards may go in any free slot, regardless of how that slot is marked.

Once a card is placed it stays there. There is no rearranging, only undo.

Clearing pairs

When the board is full, you start removing cards. Any two cards whose ranks add up to ten come off together — an eight with a two, a six with a four, an ace with a nine. A ten is removed by itself. Face cards never pair; they can only be removed as part of a completed board being cleared.

When you have taken off every available combination, you go back to drawing and placing again.

The two ways to lose

You draw a face card and every slot it is allowed to occupy is already taken.
The board is full and no two cards on it add up to ten.

Get through the deck without either happening and you win.

Strategy

The board is small and the deck is not, so almost every placement is a bet about what is still coming.

Keep face-card slots free as long as you can

There are twelve face cards in the deck and only eight slots that will take them — four corners, two top-and-bottom middles, two side middles. That arithmetic is the game. Every time you drop a numbered card into a corner because it was convenient, you have made a king slightly more likely to kill you.

Prefer slots that will never be needed by a face card

The slots that are neither corners nor edge-middles can only ever be filled by numbered cards. Fill those first, always, and treat the eight face-card slots as reserved until you have no alternative.

Think in tens when you place, not just when you clear

A board covered in sevens, eights and nines is a board that cannot clear itself. When you have a genuine choice of slot, consider what is already down: placing a four next to a six you can see is better than placing it next to another four.

Do not clear every pair you can find

This is the counter-intuitive one. Removing an eight and a two empties two slots, which sounds good — but if you have three eights left in the deck and no more twos, you have just spent your only partner for them. When several pairings are available, take the one that uses the ranks you are least likely to see again.

Count the face cards you have already seen

Four kings, four queens, four jacks. If three kings are already in corners, the fourth is the only card that can kill you through the corner rule, and you can start filling that last corner with reasonable confidence. Tracking this changes the endgame completely.

Variants

The multiplayer game — confusingly, the name "Kings in the Corner" more commonly refers to a two-to-four-player shedding game in which a cross of foundation piles is built down in alternating colours and kings start new piles in the corners. It is an entirely different game that shares the name and the corner motif.
Pairs to eleven or thirteen — the same slot-filling structure with a different target sum, which changes which ranks are dangerous to collect.
Unlimited undo — treating the game as a puzzle to be solved rather than a single pass, which is how most players actually approach it.
Larger boards — versions with more slots, which raises the win rate substantially by relieving the face-card pressure.

Where Kings in the Corner came from

This is a modern solitaire of unclear authorship, and its name is the most interesting thing about its history. The traditional game called Kings in the Corner — sometimes Kings Corners — is a nineteenth or early twentieth-century American family card game for two to four players, and it is a shedding game rather than a solitaire: players lay out a cross of piles, build them down in alternating colours, and use kings to open the corner spaces. John McLeod's card game archive documents that version and its regional rules.

The single-player game described on this page borrows the corner-and-cross imagery and the king placement rule but is structurally a member of the pairing patience family — the same group as Pyramid, where the mechanic is arithmetic rather than sequence-building. Games of that type are documented in Victorian patience collections under various names, and the slot-based board here is a computer-era formalisation of the idea. The overlapping names are a genuine source of confusion, and it is worth checking the rules rather than the title when someone proposes a game of it.

Questions people ask about Kings in the Corner

Where can kings be placed?: Only in the four corner slots. Queens go in the middle slots of the top and bottom rows, jacks in the middle slots of the left and right columns, and numbered cards can go anywhere that is free.
How do I remove cards?: Pair two cards whose ranks add up to ten — an eight with a two, a seven with a three, an ace with a nine. A ten comes off on its own. Face cards cannot be paired.
How do I lose?: Two ways. Either you draw a face card and every slot it is permitted to occupy is already full, or the board fills up with no two cards on it adding to ten.
Can I move a card once it is placed?: No. Placement is permanent for the rest of the game, which is why the decision about which slot to use matters so much. Undo is available if you want to treat the game as a puzzle.
Is this the same as the multiplayer Kings in the Corner?: No. The better-known game of that name is a two-to-four-player shedding game where you build piles down in alternating colours and kings open the corners. This is a single-player pairing game that shares the name and the corner rule.
Can every deal be won?: No. With twelve face cards competing for eight legal slots, an unlucky sequence of draws can end the game regardless of how well you have played. Managing that risk is the whole skill.