Napoleon at st helena card games

The game described here, Napoleon at St Helena is described in a book by Swedish author Einar Werner under the name Napoleon pâ S:t Helena in his 1948 work Världens Bästa Patienser och Patiensspiel ("World's Best solitaire games"). It is very similar to the game that Martin Gardener describes as Baker's Game in his 1968 Scientific American article, but also has a couple of crucial differences that we will see below.

Note that other solitaire games also exist with similar titles.

Layout

Napoleon at St Helena is played with the entire deck dealt face up at the start of the game. The cards are dealt as follows:

• 48 of the cards are dealt into 8 columns of six cards each;
• the remaining four cards form "store" piles or reserves.

The layout also includes four foundation piles, which are initially empty.

The "store" piles (referred to as "depân" in Swedish author's Einar Werner's description of the game) are the equivalents to the cells in Free Cell or Baker's Game: they are effectively "slots" that hold one card each and are used by the player to organise the cards. But crucially, in Napoleon at St Helena, these store piles are filled at the start of the game. Before other cards can be placed in them, the initial cards must be played on to the tableau or foundations.

Napoleon in St Helena (Napoleon pâ S:t Helena) layout in Solitaire Whizz for iPad

Aim

The aim, as with FreeCell, is to build all cards on to the foundation piles, one pile per suit. As the Aces become available, build them on to the foundations, followed by the corresponding 2s etc.

Gameplay

The bottom card of any foundation column is available for play at any time. An available card may be played on to a foundation (ascending order, one foundation per suit), on to a store pile, or on to another column. As in FreeCell, to build on to another column, you must do so in downward sequence, alternating red/black.

Cards in the "store" piles are always available for play, either on to a foundation or on to the bottom of a column in the tableau.

Empty columns may be filled with a king. This therefore differs from Free Cell, where columns can be filled with any card.

St. Helena (card game)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Forty Thieves, also known as Napoleon at St. Helena, is a two-deck solitaire game. Because so much of the game depends on the order the cards are dealt to the tableau, winning the game is very much dependent on luck, rather than skill.

A legend, likely untrue, says that the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte played solitaire to pass the time when exiled to the island of St. Helena. This game is supposedly the version he preferred.

Object of Forty Thieves (Napoleon at St. Helena)

The object of Forty Thieves is to move all of the cards from the tableau and stock to the foundations.

Setup

To play Forty Thieves, shuffle together two decks of Denexa 100% Plastic Playing Cards. (It doesn’t matter whether the back designs differ, so using one of our two-deck sets works well.) Deal ten face-up columns of four cards each. These 40 face-up cards form the tableau. The spaces above the first eight tableau columns are reserved the foundations. The 64 cards in the deck stub then become the stock.

Game play

As aces are revealed, move them to the foundations. Each foundation may be built up with further cards of the same suit, in ascending rank. Cards rank in their usual order, with aces low. (For example, a foundation starting with the A♠ would have the 2♠ played next upon it, then the 3♠, and so on.)

In the tableau, only the top card of each column (i.e. the card with no other cards overlapping it) may be moved. Multiple cards cannot be moved as a unit. Cards from the tableau may either be moved to the foundations or onto another card in the tableau of the same suit but one rank higher. When empty spaces occur in the tableau, they may be filled by any card.

Cards can be drawn from the stock, one at a time, and moved either to the tableau or the foundations. If a card from the stock cannot be used, it is placed next to the stock in a discard pile. When the stock is exhausted, the discard pile may be turned over to refresh the stock.

The game ends whenever all 104 cards are moved to the foundations (a win) or no further moves are possible (a loss).

Posted in Game Rules | Tags: card games, forty thieves, napoleon at saint helena, napoleon at st. helena, solitaire

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