Pyramid Solitaire looks like the gentlest game in the family: twenty-eight cards in a neat triangle, pair up anything that adds to thirteen, done in two minutes. Then you lose six deals in a row and start to suspect the triangle is laughing at you. It is. Under the strictest rules Pyramid is one of the hardest patiences ever printed, and even with the friendlier stock rules most versions use, ours included, it stays the luckiest solitaire on this site. What skill there is lives in one habit, and this guide is mostly about that habit.
How does Pyramid Solitaire work?
Twenty-eight cards are dealt face up into a pyramid of seven rows: one card at the top, then two, three and so on down to a row of seven. Each card is overlapped by the two cards below it, and a card is only available to play while nothing rests on it, which at the start means only the bottom row. The remaining twenty-four cards form the stock. You remove cards in pairs whose values add to exactly thirteen: Ace counts one, Jack eleven, Queen twelve, and number cards their face value. Kings count thirteen by themselves and are removed alone. Turn the stock one card at a time onto a waste pile; the top card of the waste is always available to pair with any free pyramid card. Clear the whole pyramid and you win.
How to play Pyramid (step by step)
- Take every King you can reach; they cost nothing and each one uncovers what it was sitting on.
- Before pairing anything else, look at what each available pair would uncover, and prefer the pair that frees the card holding the most weight above it.
- Turn the stock when the pyramid offers nothing, and check every new waste card against all the free pyramid cards, not just the obvious one.
- Keep track of which partners for each rank are still buried; a card whose partners are all beneath it is a dead card.
- Use undo whenever a pair uncovers something useless; the point of undo is to see before you commit.
- Clear the last card before your third pass through the stock runs out.
The pairs, and why there are only six of them
Every rank has exactly one partner: Ace and Queen, Two and Jack, Three and Ten, Four and Nine, Five and Eight, Six and Seven. Kings stand alone. That means each card in the deck has exactly four cards in the whole game that can remove it, and where those four cards are decides everything. If you are looking at a free Five and all four Eights are somewhere above it in the pyramid, that Five is never going to leave the table, and every card above it is stuck too. Learn the six pairs until they are reflexes; the game gets much faster once you stop doing arithmetic and start seeing Four-Nine as a single shape.
Look underneath before you take the easy pair
This is the habit. Two free cards that add to thirteen are sitting there, so you take them. Except that the Seven you just removed was one of only two Sevens still in play, and the other one is buried under the Six you were going to need it for. Pyramid punishes the obvious move more than any other solitaire, because a pair does two things at once: it removes two cards, and it removes two partners from the game. Before you click, ask which pair uncovers the most. A card in the middle of the fourth row is holding up a whole wedge of the pyramid; a card at the edge of the bottom row is holding up nothing. When two pairs are available, take the one that opens the board, and if the easy pair only clears an edge, it will still be there in a moment.
Kings are free, so spend them
A King needs no partner, which makes it the one card that can never get stuck behind a missing match. Take Kings the moment they are free. There is no reason to hold one back, and the card underneath is always more useful than the King was. The same goes for the stock: a King that turns up on the waste costs nothing to remove and clears the waste for whatever comes next.
The stock and the three passes
The stock is where Pyramid's luck lives. Twenty-four cards turn over one at a time, and you can only pair the card currently on top of the waste. Our version gives you three passes through the stock, so a partner that goes by unused on the first pass will come round again; the strict original allows one, which is why the traditional win rate is so low. Even with three, do not burn the stock early. Turn it when the pyramid genuinely offers nothing, and when you do turn a card, check it against every free pyramid card before turning the next. Players lose most often by flicking through the stock looking for one specific card and skipping past the three pairs it could have made on the way.
Undo, scoring and what counts as a win
Press U to undo, or Space to draw from the stock without reaching for the mouse. Undo in Pyramid is not a crutch; it is how you look underneath a card without committing to the pair. Clearing the whole pyramid earns a hundred-point bonus, and the game keeps your best score in your browser, so a deal where you clear twenty-six of twenty-eight cards still puts a number on the board. Clearing all twenty-eight happens rather less often than the neat little triangle suggests, and it stays satisfying for exactly that reason.
How often can Pyramid be won?
Under the original single-pass rules, about one deal in fifty. That is not a typo, and it is why almost every computer version, this one included, allows more than one pass through the stock. With three passes the odds improve a great deal, but Pyramid remains the variant where the deal decides most of the result. Treat it like Golf or Tri Peaks rather than FreeCell: the aim over a session is a better clearance rate and a higher best score, not a perfect record.
Where Pyramid comes from
Nobody knows who invented it. The standard description is the one Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith set down as "Pyramid (Pile of Twenty-eight)" in their Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games in 1949: twenty-eight cards in a pyramid, pairs that add to thirteen, Kings leaving on their own. Microsoft published a variant called Tut's Tomb in Windows Entertainment Pack 2 in 1991, and in 2012 Pyramid became one of the five games in Microsoft Solitaire Collection, which is where most people playing it today first met it.
Frequently asked questions
Which cards add up to 13 in Pyramid Solitaire?
Ace and Queen, Two and Jack, Three and Ten, Four and Nine, Five and Eight, Six and Seven. Kings are worth thirteen on their own and are removed without a partner.
Can every Pyramid Solitaire deal be won?
No. With a single pass through the stock only around two percent of deals can be cleared. Our version allows three passes, which raises the odds considerably, but Pyramid stays a game where the shuffle decides a lot of the result.
What happens when the stock runs out?
The waste is turned back over and you go through it again. You get three passes in total here; when the third is used up and no pair is left on the pyramid, the deal is over and the score for the cards you did clear is kept.
For the members of the family that reward planning more, the FreeCell guide and the Klondike guide are the next reads, and our comparison of the whole solitaire family puts Pyramid's luck next to the others' in a table. Tri Peaks and Golf, its two closest relatives, sit with it on the solitaire page.
Play Pyramid Solitaire free in your browser: three passes through the stock, undo, a hundred-point clear bonus, tap or click, nothing to download. Take the Kings, look underneath, and see how many of the twenty-eight you can get.