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Fortress is a relative of Beleaguered Castle, with two more columns and shorter ones. Every card is dealt face up, so nothing is hidden. If you lose, the cards you needed were on the board the whole time.
Columns build in suit, but in either direction, so a 10 of clubs can go on the 9 or the Jack of clubs. With only one card moving at a time, it is very easy to tie a suit in knots.
All 52 cards are dealt face up into ten columns. Two columns get six cards and the other eight get five. The four foundations start empty.
Move all 52 cards to the foundations. Once the rest can go up in order, autocomplete finishes the game for you.
We ran our own solver on 200 shuffled deals of this version. It found a win in 12 of 200 (6%), showed that 151 could not be won, and ran out of its budget of 20,000 positions a deal on 37.
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.
Fortress is described in Lady Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience, with the columns in two groups and the foundations between them.
Love Fortress? Try these other solitaire variants on Solitaire Scramble:
Fortress has ten shorter columns instead of eight, builds in suit in either direction rather than down in any suit, and leaves the Aces in the deal instead of starting them on the foundations.
No. All 52 are face up from the start.
No, one at a time only. To move a run, place its cards one by one using other cards or empty columns.
No. Ranks do not wrap in the columns, so a King can only go on a Queen and an Ace can only go on a 2.