How to Play
Black Hole is a one-player patience invented by David Parlett in which all 52 cards are dealt face up at once. Clear the entire deck onto a single foundation pile by building a continuous rank sequence that wraps from King to Ace.
Black Hole is a challenging one-player patience game invented by the British games historian David Parlett in 1998. It is played with a single 52-card deck dealt into one central foundation pile and seventeen tableau piles of three cards each, and the goal is to move every card onto the foundation by building a continuous rank sequence that wraps from King back around to Ace, with suit ignored entirely. Because the whole layout is dealt face up at the very start, with no stock and no redeal, Black Hole is a game of complete information: every card is visible from move one, so success depends entirely on planning rather than luck. A single careless move can strand cards beyond reach and end the deal in a loss, which is why the game is prized among patience enthusiasts as one of the purest tests of forward planning in the genre.
Quick Reference
- Place the face up alone as the foundation pile.
- Deal the remaining 51 cards face up into seventeen tableau piles of three cards each.
- Compare each tableau pile's top card with the foundation's top card.
- Move a tableau top card onto the foundation if its rank is one step above or below in the circular King-Ace-2 sequence.
- Repeat until every tableau pile is empty (a win) or no tableau top card can legally move (a loss).
- There is no numeric score; each deal is simply won or lost.
- Win: all 51 tableau cards have joined the foundation pile.
- Loss: none of the exposed tableau top cards can legally extend the foundation.
Players
1 player. Black Hole is a solitary patience game with no partnership, team, or competitive multiplayer form; every deal is a private contest between the player and the shuffle.
Card Deck
One standard 52-card deck, no jokers, using all four suits and all thirteen ranks. Rank has no fixed high or low end in Black Hole: the sequence runs in an unbroken circle, so a Queen is followed by a King, a King by an Ace, and an Ace by a 2, all the way back around.
Objective
Move all 51 non-foundation cards onto a single central foundation pile, leaving every one of the seventeen tableau piles empty. Because there is no stock and no redeal, a position where no legal move remains simply ends the game as a loss; there is no partial credit for clearing most of the tableau.
Setup
- Remove the from the shuffled 52-card deck and place it face up alone in the center of the table; this single card is the foundation pile, informally called the 'Black Hole.'
- Shuffle the remaining 51 cards and deal them face up into seventeen tableau piles of three cards each, fanned or squared so every card in every pile stays visible.
- Only the last card dealt onto each pile, its top card, is available to play; the two cards beneath it are exposed to view but not yet playable.
- No cards are held in reserve and no stock remains after the deal: every one of the 52 cards is on the table and visible from the very first move.
Gameplay
- Compare the foundation pile's current top card with the top card of each of the seventeen tableau piles. A tableau card may move onto the foundation if its rank sits exactly one step above or one step below the foundation's top card in the circular rank sequence.
- The circle has no break: a foundation topped by a King accepts a Queen or an Ace, and a foundation topped by an Ace accepts a King or a 2. For example, a foundation showing accepts any or , regardless of suit.
- When a tableau pile's top card moves to the foundation, the card beneath it becomes the new top card of that pile and is immediately available for the next move.
- There is no stock to draw from and no redeal of any kind. Continue moving one legal card at a time from a tableau top to the foundation until either every tableau pile is empty (a win) or no tableau top card can legally extend the foundation (a loss).
- Because every card is dealt face up at the start, Black Hole is a game of complete information: nothing is hidden, so every loss traces back to an earlier choice rather than an unlucky draw.
Winning
The game is won the instant the last tableau card joins the foundation pile, leaving all 52 cards stacked in the center and all seventeen tableau piles empty. If at any point none of the exposed tableau top cards is one rank away from the foundation's top card, the deal is lost with cards still stranded on the tableau. There is no partial score and no tie-break to argue over: each deal is a clean win or a clean loss, decided entirely by the choices made along the way rather than by chance.
Tips and Strategy
- Look several moves ahead before committing to a play. Because the entire layout is visible from the start, most losing positions are the result of insufficient lookahead rather than bad luck.
- When two different tableau tops could legally extend the foundation, prefer freeing the pile that unburies a card whose only rank-neighbor is trapped deep in another pile.
- Treat the wraparound between King, Ace, and 2 as an ordinary run rather than a special case. Many losing players mistakenly treat the Ace as a hard boundary and misjudge which cards are actually reachable.
- Watch for cards whose two rank-neighbors are both buried at the bottom of the same pile; those cards are the likeliest bottlenecks and deserve extra planning early in the deal.
Variations
- Fourteen Out: Also devised by David Parlett, this relative deals a tableau plus a reserve and uses two foundation piles instead of one, with the same circular rank principle but a higher win rate.
- Undo-permitted play: Many digital versions allow unlimited undo or a full replay of the same shuffle, turning Black Hole into a solvable puzzle rather than a one-shot test of planning. Purists play each shuffle exactly once, with no takebacks.
- Timed Black Hole: A casual house variant that caps thinking time per move, emphasizing pattern recognition over exhaustive lookahead.
Glossary
- Tableau: The seventeen face-up piles of three cards each that hold every card not yet moved to the foundation.
- Foundation: The single central pile, built outward from the , onto which every other card is eventually moved.
- Top card: The exposed, playable card of a tableau pile, the last card dealt into that pile.
- Complete information: A game state in which every card is visible to the player from the very first deal, so no stock, hand, or opponent hides anything.
Tips & Strategy
Because every card is visible before the first move, Black Hole rewards patient lookahead more than quick reflexes. Before playing a card, trace the chain of rank-neighbors it depends on and check whether both of its neighbors are still reachable; a card whose neighbors are buried deep in the same pile is a warning sign. Treat the King-Ace-2 wraparound as an ordinary link in the chain rather than a boundary, since many losing games come from misjudging what counts as playable near the turn of the circle.
The wraparound between King, Ace, and 2 is the single most common source of losing lines, since players used to Ace-high or Ace-low games instinctively treat the Ace as a wall rather than a normal link in the chain. Strong play means tracing, before every move, which two ranks a card depends on and confirming both are still reachable somewhere in the seventeen piles; a card with both neighbors buried under each other in the same pile is the most dangerous shape on the board and should be resolved as early as possible.
Trivia & Fun Facts
Every one of the 52 cards is visible before the very first move is made, which makes Black Hole one of the few widely played patience games with zero hidden information; any loss is therefore a result of the player's own choices rather than an unlucky draw. The seventeen tableau piles of three cards each account for exactly 51 cards, with the fifty-second card, the [A♠], serving alone as the foundation's starting point.
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01Why is Black Hole considered a game of complete information, unlike Klondike or Spider?Answer Because all 51 non-foundation cards are dealt face up across the seventeen tableau piles at the very start, with no face-down stock and no hidden cards anywhere, so every card in the game is visible to the player before the first move is made.
History & Culture
Black Hole was created by the English games historian and Scrabble champion David Parlett, who published it in his 1998 patience collection alongside other original designs such as Fourteen Out. Parlett designed the game specifically to explore what a patience game looks like when every card is dealt face up and no luck is left in the deal beyond the initial shuffle, a departure from the hidden-card mechanics of older classics like Klondike. It has since become a staple of digital solitaire collections and is often cited by patience writers as one of the more intellectually demanding entries in the modern repertoire.
As one of the relatively small number of well documented patience games invented in the late 20th century rather than inherited from 19th-century card-game literature, Black Hole is frequently cited by games historians as an example of the genre still evolving. Its complete-information design, borrowed from puzzle design more than traditional solitaire, has influenced later hybrid patience-and-puzzle games and cemented David Parlett's reputation as a deliberate, analytical designer rather than a mere compiler of folk rules.
Variations & House Rules
Fourteen Out, Parlett's companion design, spreads the same circular rank-wraparound idea across two foundation piles plus a small reserve, which raises the win rate compared to Black Hole's single unforgiving foundation. Some digital implementations allow unlimited undo or let a shuffle be replayed, which turns the game into a solvable puzzle rather than a one-shot test; purists insist on playing each deal exactly once. A casual timed variant caps the thinking time allowed per move, shifting the challenge toward quick pattern recognition.
For a gentler introduction, allow a single undo per deal so a beginner can recover from an obviously bad early move without restarting entirely. For a sterner challenge, forbid all backtracking and require a lost shuffle to be replayed from the identical deal, exactly the way David Parlett intended the game to be played. Timing each deal and comparing results across attempts turns solitary practice into a simple personal scoreboard, since Black Hole itself keeps no numeric score.
More Solitaire Variants
