La Belle Lucie – Play Online for Free

La Belle Lucie, the beautiful Lucie, is one of the true classics of solitaire. The deck is laid out in eighteen small fans, seventeen of three cards each and one made up of the single card left over. Everything is face up, and yet the game is anything but easy, because cards only move one at a time and you build strictly within the same suit. What makes it special are two chances at a fresh start: twice per game you may gather up all the cards still in the layout, shuffle them and deal them out again.

The game has its roots in France, and the first description in English came from Lady Adelaide Cadogan in her book of patience games from the 1870s. No source says who the beautiful Lucie was. English speakers also call the game Lovely Lucy, and closely related versions go around under names such as Alexander the Great, Midnight Oil or Clover Leaves. Some rule books grant one extra move after the last shuffle, called the merci, which lets you pull out a single buried card. That bonus really belongs to a variant of its own and is deliberately left out here.

Eighteen Fans, Two Fresh Starts: The Rules of La Belle Lucie at a Glance

All the cards are visible, spread across eighteen fans, which appear here as short columns in two rows of nine. On the right the four foundations form a column, with the button for reshuffling beneath them. A complete suit is built on each foundation, beginning with the Ace and ending with the King. When all four are full, the game is won.

• Playable cards: In each fan you can only take the front card that nothing covers, and a single card is all that ever moves.
• Building: A card may only go on the card that outranks it by one in its own suit, so the Six of Spades has a single home on the Seven of Spades. Because every card exists only once, each card has at most one possible place in the tableau, and a King has none at all.
• Empty fans: Once a fan has been cleared, the gap stays empty for the rest of the round; not even a King may move in.
• Reshuffling: Everything that is not on a foundation is gathered up, shuffled and dealt out again in fans of three, and a leftover card forms a fan of its own. You may do this twice per game, and at any moment you choose, not only when you are stuck. The bar at the top counts how many reshuffles you have left.
• Foundations: On Normal and Hard, whatever lies there stays for good. Only the Easy level lets you take the top card back into play.
• Controls: A tapped card heads for its foundation where possible, else for its one fitting place in the tableau. Where there is none, it wiggles. Dragging works the same way. As soon as it is clear that the remaining cards will reach home without obstacles, the game takes over the finish.

Apart from the take-back rule on Easy, the same rules apply on every level, the two fresh starts included. The levels differ in how favorably the cards fall.

Strategies for Lovely Lucy:

• Harvest everything before you shuffle: When the cards are redealt, the only thing that counts is what already sits on the foundations. How tidy the tableau looks beforehand makes no difference. So spend each round on moves that actually bring cards home, and shuffle only when none are left.
• Recognize Kings as roadblocks: A King has nowhere to go in the tableau. If it lies on low cards of its own suit, those cards are trapped until the next shuffle. Fans like that are often the reason to use a fresh start.
• Never break up a fan for nothing: Moving the last card of a fan onto another fan gains you nothing. The gap stays empty, and the card it lands on is now covered.
• Order beats speed: Since each card has only one place, you rarely have to decide where a card goes, but you often have to decide which card goes first. Free the cards that can soon reach their foundation, and check which card each move uncovers.
• Once placed, it stays put: When a card sits on its direct successor in the suit, the only way it can leave again is to its foundation. So think twice about whether you really want to park it there.

Fans, Suits and Fresh Cards: Five Picks for Your Next Round

Each of these games takes up one of this game's quirks and does something different with it:

• Baker's Dozen: Likewise an open layout without any supply of new cards, single moves and gaps that stay empty. There the deck is dealt into thirteen columns of four, you build regardless of suit, and nothing is ever reshuffled.
• Gaps Solitaire: Everything is face up here as well, and twice you may shuffle the unsorted remainder anew. Instead of filling foundations, you use four gaps to sort the cards into four rows, one per suit.
• Forty & Eight Solitaire: Same-suit building and single moves just as in La Belle Lucie, but with two decks and a stock that runs through twice. A free column there takes any card.
• Russian Solitaire: There, too, each card has just one possible base: the next rank up in its own suit. In return, whole piles may move there along with a disordered load on top, and face-down cards hide beneath the face-up ones.
• Freecell: Probably the best-known game with a fully visible layout. Four free cells let you set single cards aside for a while, and you build in alternating colors.