Scorpion Solitaire: play free online
Scorpion has no foundation piles to feed as you go. Everything is assembled on the spot: four runs, one per suit, each of them from the king down to the ace, built inside the seven columns. A run that completes leaves the table by itself, and when the fourth one goes the board is empty and you have won.
Almost anything on the board can be lifted. Pick out any face-up card — one sitting under four others counts — and every card above it comes away in one piece, in whatever order it happens to be in. Only the card you lifted is measured against the destination.
That latitude matters, because there is nowhere to set a card aside. No free cells, no reserve, and a stock of exactly three cards, dealt once and never refilled.
How Scorpion Solitaire is dealt
Forty-nine cards go straight onto the table and three are held back:
- Tableau: seven columns of seven cards. In the four columns on the left the first three cards are face down and the last four face up. The three columns on the right are face up the whole way. 12 cards are hidden in total.
- Stock: the three cards left over, at the top right. One tap deals all three at once, face up, one onto each of the first three columns.
- The four slots above the board are not built on. They stay empty until a suit is finished inside a column, at which point those 13 cards leave the tableau and rest there.
How to win Scorpion Solitaire
Finish four runs of 13 cards, king down to ace, one for each suit, in the columns themselves. There is nowhere else to build them. Each finished run is collected automatically; when all four are gone the deal is solved.
Scorpion Solitaire rules
- Lift any face-up card and everything piled on it moves with it. The group can be in complete disarray. What counts is where the card you lifted comes to rest.
- Columns build down one rank at a time, never changing suit. The 8♥️ goes on the 9♥️ and nowhere else. Matching color is not enough, and neither is the rank on its own — and the 9♥️ must be exposed, with nothing on top of it.
- An empty column takes a king, and only a king. He can arrive on his own or with everything he was carrying.
- A card that loses its cover turns face up on its own.
- The three reserved cards come out once and do not come back. Tap the stock and they deal instantly onto columns one, two and three. There is no second deal and no recycling.
- A completed suit removes itself. When the last 13 cards of a column run from the king to the ace in one suit, the game lifts them out and sets them in a slot above the board. You do nothing, and short of an Undo those cards are gone.
- Tap and the game finds the destination, drag and you pick it — either way, every card above the one you chose travels with it.
- If no move remains, the board tells you with No moves available. Step back with Undo from there, or start again.
Tips and strategy for Scorpion Solitaire
- The four left-hand columns decide the deal. They hold the only hidden cards, 12 of them, and until those turn over you are playing a quarter of the deck blind. Everything else is already on the table and can be counted.
- Keep the kings shallow, even ahead of a flip. A king has no landing spot anywhere except an empty column, so every card stacked on him is another card to strip off later — and every run starts from a king. With only 12 cards hidden, the flip will come round again; a king under four cards will not dig himself out.
- Note where the aces are. The ace closes a run, which means it is played last and has to be free at exactly the right moment. An ace under five cards can block you on the final lap.
- Hold the stock back. Those three cards are the only new information in the whole game and they are spent in a single tap. Play them when the table has stalled, not while you still have comfortable moves.
- Breaking up a tidy run is normal. A stretch of column already in order often has to come apart to release a card needed elsewhere. Order can be rebuilt; a card left face down cannot be guessed.
- Undo has no limit. One move here shifts a lot of cards, so a mistake usually becomes clear only after the table has rearranged itself. When you cannot see anything at all, press Hint.
If you like picking cards up this way, Yukon uses the same rule but builds in alternating colors and fills four foundations from the ace upward. If it is the vanishing sequences that appeal, Spider 2 Suits does the same trick with two decks, ten columns and five extra rows to deal.