Streets and Alleys Solitaire

How to Play Streets and Alleys

Streets and Alleys is Beleaguered Castle without the head start. The Aces go into the shuffle with everything else, so before you can build anything, you have to find a way to reach them.

As in Beleaguered Castle, every card is visible from the start, and only your planning stands between you and a win.

Setup

All 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns. The first four columns get seven cards each and the last four get six.

Rules

Foundations build up in suit from Ace to King.
Columns build down one rank at a time, in any suit.
Only the bottom card of a column can move, and only one at a time.
Any single card can move to an empty column.
There is no stock. Every card is in play from the start.

How to win

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.

How often can Streets and Alleys be won?

We ran our own solver on 200 shuffled deals of this version. It found a win in 7 of 200 (4%), showed that 81 could not be won, and ran out of its budget of 20,000 positions a deal on 112.

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.

Streets and Alleys Strategy

Locate all four Aces before your first move and work out which is cheapest to free. An Ace deep in a seven-card column can shape the whole game.
Free the Aces and 2s in an order that opens a column along the way. One empty column makes everything after it easier.
Keep your runs short until you have space to move them.
Test ideas with Undo. Since nothing is hidden, you can follow a line of play to the end and come back if it fails.