Play Beleaguered Castle Solitaire online, right in your browser. Green Felt solitaire games feature innovative game-play
features and a friendly, competitive community.
Beleaguered Castle is a solitaire card game played with a deck of 52 playing cards. It is one of the games tauted as "Freecell without cells" because its game play is somehow akin to the popular solitaire computer game but without extra empty spaces to maneuver. This game is also called Laying Siege and Sham Battle.
First, the player has to remove the aces from the deck and align them vertically without overlapping them. They form the foundations. Then cards are dealt to the left and right of the aces, forming eight rows of six overlapping cards each.
The top card of each row (the cards that are exposed) is available for play either on the foundations or on any other row. The foundations are built up to Kings in suit and the rows are built down regardless of suit. Once a row becomes empty, it is filled by any card.
The game is won when all of the cards are built onto the foundations. But this is easier said than done because most games are doomed to fail in just a few moves.
There are many keys you can use to make your game playing more efficient:
- Space
- Auto-finish—In foundation games, this moves all the cards it can up to the foundations
- z
- Undo
- x
- Redo
- n
- New Game
- g
- Replay the same game
- f
- Flip a card from the stock
There is also a card-finder keyboard feature you can use to help you locate cards:
- a
- Highlight the aces
- 1 though 9
- Highlight the cards with the rank pressed
- 0 or t
- Highlight the tens
- d, c, h, s
- Highlight the cards with the suit
- r, b
- Highlight the red or black cards
You may combine the rank keys with the suit or color keys. For example, if you hold down the "5" key and
the "d" key then only the 5 of diamonds will be highlighted. "a" and "r" will highlight the red aces.
There are ways to use the mouse to make your game playing more efficient:
- Left Click
- Move the card to the most logical place (might not be the best move, however)
- Left Click in Empty Area
- Auto-finish—In foundation games, this moves all the cards it can up to the foundations
- Right Click
- Undo
You can use super moves to make your game playing more efficient.
Clicking or dragging a card that isn't immediately accessible will attempt to move all the cards
above it in its stack until the move is valid. The effect will be the same as clicking each card. If you
cancel the drag or undo the move, all the cards will go back to where they were.
Dragging a card or cards to the middle of a stack will attempt to move all the cards above the
destination out of the way. The effect is the same as clicking each card. To see where the cards will
move, hold the dragged card(s) at the destination for a second. If you decide to move the dragged
card(s) somewhere else, just drag them there and the other cards will go back to where they
were. Undoing the move will also move the cards back.
If you drag a card or cards to the middle of a stack and the cards that move away would be valid to
move back on top of the dragged card(s), then they'll slide out of the way and let you just slip the
card(s) in.