General Rules

There are some characteristics common to all the games in this package. Most of them are played with standard 52-card decks, either one or two. The cards in each suit are ranked King high. K stands for King, Q stands for Queen and J stands for Jack. In each game, the cards are piled up in either ascending or descending order, on stacks in the main playing area, called the Tableau, or piles off to the side, called Foundations. Some piles must be built up in sequence within the same suit, and others are built up in suits of alternating colors.

The Talon is the stack of cards remaining in the deck, not yet played upon any of the piles, and not yet placed in the discard pile. Some people also call it the Stock or the Hand.

The object of each of these games is to use up all the cards in building Foundations, or to use up all cards in the Talon according to the rules of the particular game. If all the cards are used up, you win. If not, you lose.

In all of the games, you deal cards from the Talon to the discard pile by clicking once on the Talon with the left mouse button, or pressing <D>. Where permitted by the rules, you can turn over any face-down card with a single click of the left mouse button. You pick up and move a card by clicking on it and holding the button down while you drag it to its intended destination. If the move would violate the rules, the card will not go anywhere. If any card or cards can be put on a Foundation, or in the Ace discard pile of Picture Gallery, a single press of the <A> key will do all of them, a handy way to quickly finish certain games. Sometimes the <A> key will build up the Foundations more than you would like, and these rules allow you to put cards back into the Tableau from the Foundations. Of course, you can also use the Undo key <Z>.

If you're confused by all this, just watch a demo game :-)

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