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There is no stock and nothing is hidden in Beleaguered Castle. Every card is on the table from the first move, so if you lose, it was the plan, not the luck of the draw.
It has been described as FreeCell without the cells, and that is about right: all the same long-range thinking, with less room to work.
The four Aces start on the foundations. The other 48 cards are dealt face up into eight columns of six.
Move all 52 cards to the foundations. Once the remaining cards can all go up in order, the autocomplete button finishes the game for you.
We ran our own solver on 200 shuffled deals of this version. It found a win in 26 of 200 (13%), showed that 60 could not be won, and ran out of its budget of 20,000 positions a deal on 114.
Those undecided deals may still be winnable, so treat the win count as a minimum. The solver can see every card, including face-down ones, so it measures what the cards allow, not how often a person will win.
First recorded in 1883. Other names include Laying Siege and Sham Battle.
Love Beleaguered Castle? Try these other solitaire variants on Solitaire Scramble:
No. One published study (Blake and Gent, 2019) put it at about 68% with perfect play. Our own search figure on this page is a lower bound from a limited search.
In Streets and Alleys the Aces are shuffled into the deck, so the first four columns hold seven cards and you have to dig the Aces out first.
It is the traditional setup, and it gives you all four foundations to build on immediately.
No. Any 8 can go on any 9. Suits only matter on the foundations.