Pyramid Solitaire
Pyramid is arithmetic rather than architecture. Nothing is built and nothing is stacked — you simply pair cards that add to thirteen and watch the structure come apart, or fail to.
Click two cards that add to thirteen, or click a king on its own. Reset the stock as often as you like.
| Players | 1 |
|---|---|
| Deck | One standard 52-card deck |
| Play time | 3–8 minutes |
| Difficulty | Easy to play, frequently impossible to win |
How to play Pyramid Solitaire
Twenty-eight cards are dealt into a pyramid of seven rows, one card at the apex down to seven along the base. Each card is partly covered by the two cards below it. The remaining twenty-four cards form the stock, which turns to a face-up waste, and removed cards go to a foundation where they leave the game.
The target is thirteen
Cards are removed in pairs whose ranks add to exactly thirteen. Aces count 1, jacks 11, queens 12 and kings 13. So: queen with ace, jack with two, ten with three, nine with four, eight with five, seven with six. A king is thirteen by itself and is removed alone.
Which cards can you use?
A pyramid card is available only when nothing covers it — at the start, that means the whole bottom row of seven. The top card of the waste is also always available. As you clear the base, cards in the rows above become free.
Legal moves
- Pair the top waste card with an available pyramid card.
- Pair two available pyramid cards with each other.
- Pair a pyramid card with a card it is covering, provided the other cover has already gone. Rule sets disagree about this; it is allowed here.
- Click the stock to turn a card to the waste. When the stock is empty, reset it from the waste — unlimited times.
- Remove any available king on its own.
Winning
Clear all twenty-eight pyramid cards. Cards left in the stock and waste do not matter.
Strategy
Pyramid is the least forgiving game on this site in one specific way: many deals are simply unwinnable, and the difference between a good and a bad player is mostly how well they exploit the deals that are.
Count the pairs before you make one
There are four of each rank. If you can see that both remaining sixes are buried under separate sevens, and both sevens need those sixes, the deal is already dead — and knowing that early saves you five minutes. Before your first move, scan the pyramid for ranks that appear twice in the same vertical chain.
Dig down the middle, not along the edges
The cards in the centre of the pyramid block the most other cards. Clearing the two outer columns feels productive and unlocks almost nothing; the apex is reachable only through the middle.
Never spend a card that a buried card needs
If the seven on the waste can pair with either an exposed six or a six buried two rows up, take the buried one — every time. Using an easy match on an easy card wastes the only key you had to the hard one. This is the mistake that loses winnable Pyramid deals.
Kings are free progress — take them immediately
A king can never pair with anything, so it is pure obstruction. There is no situation in which holding one back helps you, and every exposed king should come off the moment you see it.
Use the stock as a search, not a lottery
Because resets are unlimited, the waste is really a list you can cycle through. If a particular pyramid card needs a four, cycle until the four appears rather than making an unrelated match. Each pass costs nothing but moves.
Variants
- No covering match — most traditional descriptions forbid pairing a card with the card directly beneath it. Turning that rule off makes the game noticeably harder.
- Limited passes — one, two or three passes through the stock instead of unlimited resets. The classic form allows very few, which is why the game has a reputation for being nearly unwinnable.
- Relaxed Pyramid — the pyramid is dealt with the rows spaced so each card is covered by only one other, dramatically increasing the win rate.
- Giza — no stock at all; the twenty-four remaining cards are dealt into face-up reserve piles instead, turning it into an open puzzle.
- Tut’s Tomb and Apophis — versions with additional waste piles, giving you two or three available stock cards at a time.
Where Pyramid came from
Pyramid belongs to the family of addition or pairing patiences, which are documented in nineteenth-century collections under a range of names — games where the mechanic is arithmetic rather than sequence-building. The specific pyramid layout with a target of thirteen appears in twentieth-century compilations, and it is described in the standard American references of the mid-century period, including the collections compiled by Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith.
The Egyptian theming is decoration rather than history: there is no evidence the game has any connection to Egypt, and the variant names — Giza, Tut's Tomb, Apophis — are all modern additions from computer implementations. What the design does have is an unusually clean mathematical structure, which is why it turns up frequently in discussions of solitaire solvability. Analyses of the game generally put the proportion of winnable deals well below half even with unlimited redeals, which is considerably worse than Klondike and far worse than FreeCell.
Questions people ask about Pyramid
- What do the cards add up to in Pyramid?
- Thirteen. Aces are 1, jacks 11, queens 12 and kings 13. A king is removed on its own because it already equals thirteen.
- Which cards can I use?
- Any pyramid card with nothing covering it, plus the top card of the waste pile. At the start that means the seven cards along the base of the pyramid.
- Can I pair a card with the card underneath it?
- In this version, yes — provided the other card covering it has already been removed. Many traditional rule sets forbid this move, and turning it off makes the game significantly harder.
- How many times can I reset the stock?
- As often as you like. Since resets are unlimited, the stock is effectively a searchable list rather than a limited resource — though every turn still counts as a move.
- Can every Pyramid deal be won?
- No, and a large proportion cannot. If both cards of a needed rank are trapped in the same vertical chain, the deal is dead from the start. Learning to spot that early is a real part of the game.
- What is the best possible score?
- A game where you never touch the stock and clear the pyramid entirely in pairs, with no kings, takes fourteen moves — fourteen pairs for twenty-eight cards. It requires an extremely cooperative deal.