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Pyramid is a matching game, not a building game. You never stack cards on each other. You clear them away two at a time, and each pair has to add up to exactly 13.
Games are short, but what you remove matters: taking the obvious pair can leave you unable to reach the card you need three moves later.
Twenty-eight cards are dealt face up in a pyramid of seven rows, each row overlapping the one above. The other 24 cards form the stock. A waste pile builds up beside it as you draw.
You win as soon as all 28 pyramid cards are gone, even with cards left in the stock or waste. Some rule books also require clearing the stock, which is much harder. This version uses the pyramid-only rule.
We ran our own solver on 200 shuffled deals of this version. It found a win in 82 of 200 (41%), and ran out of its budget of 20,000 positions a deal on 118.
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.
A version called Tut's Tomb appeared in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 in 1991, and Pyramid is also part of Microsoft Solitaire Collection.
Love Pyramid? Try these other solitaire variants on Solitaire Scramble:
Ace and Queen, 2 and Jack, 3 and 10, 4 and 9, 5 and 8, and 6 and 7. A King is worth 13 alone and is removed without a partner.
Three here: the first pass plus two turnovers of the waste. Other versions range from one pass to unlimited, which is one reason published win rates for Pyramid vary so much.
No. On this site you win when the 28 pyramid cards are gone. Cards left in the stock or waste don't matter.
Tap one card to select it, then tap its partner. You can also drag one card onto the other. Tap a selected card again to deselect it. Kings go with a single tap.