Archway Solitaire Guide
Archway Patience is a thoughtful solitaire game where every card is visible from the opening deal. Use the guide below to understand the objective, learn the board layout, study the rules, and improve how you play.
Archway Solitaire is an open-information patience game played with two decks. Every card is face up from the start, so the challenge comes from sequencing and board management rather than hidden information.
This Ministry of Solitaire version keeps the classic double-foundation structure while making the layout readable on desktop and mobile.
Your goal is to move all 104 cards onto eight same-suit foundations. Four begin with aces and climb upward. Four begin with kings and build downward.
If every foundation reaches 13 cards, the game is complete.
The board has three areas: a 13-pile reserve arch, four central tableau columns, and two foundation groups at the lower left and lower right.
The reserve arch is organized by rank, which means every pile contains only one rank across the two decks. The tableau columns hold 12 face-up cards each, and only their top cards are playable.
Archway Patience is generally treated as part of the La Chatelaine or Lady of the Manor family of solitaire games. It is known for its elegant open layout and unusually strategic planning.
Its appeal comes from letting careful players read the entire deal and work through it with deliberate, almost puzzle-like decisions.
Because this digital version is fully open-information and quick to restart, many regular players report a practical success rate that can feel close to 90% over many relaxed sessions.
That figure is best treated as an approximate player-facing expectation rather than a strict mathematical guarantee for every deal.