Card Games are great fun to play with friends, but sometimes you might not have anyone to play with. Maybe you’re on a long train ride, your phone has run out of battery and there’s nothing to do except watch the landscape skate by. Solitaire is a good escape for many and is the best known single player card game, but everyone already knows that one. Today we’re going to try and explore the best single player card games that aren’t solitaire.
Table of Contents
- Royal Execution
- Joker Jailbreak
- Emperor
- Devils Grip
- Napoleon at St. Helena
- Accordion
- Streets and Alleys
- Tri Towers
- Single Player Card Games: For Me, Myself And I
Royal Execution
Ever wanted to relive the French revolution? The aim of Royal revolution is to eliminate the royals of the deck. In classic aristocratic fashion these royal cards are much stronger than you non-face card. The Jack, for example, has a value (or strength) of 11. In order to eliminate the Jack you would have to have two cards in your hand that equals 11, let’s take a 5 of hearts and 6 of spades. You would execute the Jack and discard your two cards.
I first learnt of this game through a YouTube video, but we’ve also broken the game down into more detail in this post. As with many of the games that make up this list, we’re only giving a short summary of the game. More details with rules, tips and tricks will be in dedicated posts.
Joker Jailbreak
The Joker has told one too many bad jokes and as punishment has been thrown in a dark, dingy cell. But what was his crime, to try and spread laughter and cheer? Well, if you think this is a noble cause try and break the joker out of prison.
This game has a nice aesthetic, the joker is placed in the middle of the cell and surrounded by 4 walls of cards. In a similar way to Royal Execution you must match card values in order to discard pairs. A slight difference is that this is suit dependant, you can only discard a red card by using a black card and visa-versa.
In addition to the 4 walls you also have 2 corners which give you some more possible combinations, but I’d use them as a last resort. The Joker can’t squeeze out of the corners and they’re much thinner than the walls. When the corners are used up you’ve cut down you’re total number of possible combinations.
Check out our dedicated post for a detailed description of the rules.
This YouTube video also does a great job of explaining the game, well they would, they invented it!
Emperor
Ok we were quite anti-monarchy up until this point, but it’s not so bad when you’re the one on top. Up until now we’ve only used one standard 52 card deck, but this one actually uses 2! The aim of this game is build the eight foundations of the suit from ace to king, when you’ve done this you’re crowned emperor.
Truth be told emperor is like reverse solitaire in a way, everything is starting in the deck and you are slowly building up the foundations from Ace to king whereas in solitaire you play mostly from king to ace until close.
More details here for the regal experience.
Devils Grip
A single player card game is truly hellish. I enjoy the competition and sometimes even casualness of playing with and against friends, but when that’s not possible we have to revert to devilish means. We almost have two standard decks in this game, but we remove the aces to leave us with 96 cards, so a slightly different variation on theme.
I can almost guarantee you’ve not seen a game like this. We start by laying down face up 24 cards, 3 rows of 8. To finish we need to stack all the cards in sequences in matching suits. Sequences are as follows:
- 2, 5, 8, J
- 3, 6, 9, Q
- 4, 7, 10, K
This might seem random, but you can see we’ve highlighted the numbers different colours and now you can see how the cards go straight from 2 to K. Remember, we discarded the aces earlier.
The columns in black will serve as your foundations for the rows and you can place any card of the same suit on that foundation. As you move and shuffle cards round the grid more space will open up and you can start adding cards from the deck to the grid.
If you get blocked, or can no longer move every remaining card in the deck counts as a point against the player. In the ideal scenario you would finish with 0 points i.e. every card has been placed from the deck on the grid. At the end you’ll have quite a satisfying grid of all 96 cards as you can see below.
For an in-depth guide, see here:
Napoleon at St. Helena
Another game with 2 decks. In 1815, after Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat by the British, the Frenchman was exiled to the small island of St Helena in South America. Understandably Napoleon grew pretty lonely on this island and it was said that this is the game he played to pass the time.
This is probably the trickiest game on this list and is notoriously hard to finish. Only 1 in 10 games end in a win, so if you’re going for the victory, it will be a good time sink.
Essentially we have solitaire and the earlier emperor game combined here. We have 2 rows in which we can play from, the tableau, and the foundations. The tableau is 4 kings while the foundations are 4 aces. For the kings you must build downwards from king to ace. For the aces, you guessed it, ace to king.
The difficulty really arrives when you need to use a card in both the foundation pile and the tableau pile.
Accordion
Accordion is a simple, yet effective game. Back to a single deck game. You lay out as many cards from left to right as you can with the space provided. I would suggest the row should be at least 6 to start. The aim of the game is the stack the cards on the left in a single pile.
You can stack cards with the same suit or rank that are either 1 card or 3 cards to the left of your chosen card. It doesn’t matter whether the card is higher or lower, it just needs to be the same suit (or rank).
As you slowly shuffle cards to the right add more cards from the deck to the field. When all the cards are in the deck you’ve either completed the accordion in a single pile or not. If not, time to try again.
There is a surprising amount of strategy in this game because you have the choice of either moving your chosen card 1 or 3 places as described earlier. Sometimes its an east choice because you can only do one or the other. But say you had a 6 of hearts, 1 to the left is a 6 of spades, one is
Streets and Alleys
OK, telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, this game essentially plays like vertical solitaire. Its visually different though and you have all cards face up on the table at any one time. So if it’s that part of solitaire that you don’t enjoy, accidently freeing the one card, this could be the game for you.
We lay the cards in two columns of 4 cards. The left column is 7 deep, the right is 6 deep. We also aren’t limited by suits in this game, any lower ranked card can be placed on any higher ranked card in the outlying column.
The aim is to build from the foundations in the third, currently empty, central column. In Classic solitaire style we build from ace to king. Streets and Alleys certainly isn’t an imaginative as some of the games on this list, but it mixes up the traditional formula and worth a go for sure.
A variation on this game is called Beleaguered Castle. The difference here is that you start with all 4 aces in the foundation, so you get a bit of a head start. If you’re finding Streets and Alleys a bit tricky, Beleaguered castle is a little bit easier.
Tri Towers
Tri Towers is a fun variation on the solitaire theme. We start with the three peaks which appear as pyramids on the playing space. The shape of the pyramid is 1 at the top, 2, then 3. On top of the 3 peaks we will have 10 face up cards which you will be able to play from.
The aim of this game is to get rid of all the cards that are in the peaks to the discard pile. You do this by placing cards from play into the discard pile. They must be 1 rank higher or lower than the face up card.
This is quite an easy one to be honest, you aren’t punished as hard as in spider solitaire, where if you can’t make a move you must take a whole row of new cards. If you’re stuck in tri towers, place the next card in the deck onto the discard pile. You can only lose when the deck runs out so you do have a lot of chances.
Single Player Card Games: For Me, Myself And I
This rounds up the best single player card games. As we said in the introduction, we’ve tried to show some games that aren’t solitaire, but it isn’t easy! There is of course much more variation when you play with more than one player. More mechanics can be brought into the game and also other human players are a huge variable. This article is only intended to be a short introduction of the games. We have more detailed how to plays with tips and tricks in dedicated articles that are linked throughout this page.
