Kings in the Corners rules

Setup & the deal

The board is a 4×4 grid of sixteen empty slots, twelve of them marked for specific face cards. The entire shuffled deck becomes the stock, and only its top card is visible and in play — you always know what you must place, never what comes next.

Cards rank Ace = 1 up to 10 for the number cards; Jacks, Queens and Kings are the royals. Suits never matter. The stock order is recorded at the deal, so Restart replays the identical sequence of cards.

How to play

The game alternates between two phases: placing and removing.

• Placing — the visible stock card must be placed on an empty slot before the next card appears. A King goes only on a corner, a Queen only on a top or bottom middle slot, a Jack only on a side middle slot. A number card (Ace to 10) may go on any empty slot, including the marked ones — that freedom is exactly how players get into trouble. You can never skip or discard the card in play.
• Removing — when the board fills up (and again when the stock runs out), you clear space by removing number cards: two cards whose ranks sum to ten (Ace + 9, 2 + 8, 3 + 7, 4 + 6, 5 + 5), or a lone 10 by itself. Face cards are never removed — once seated, a royal stays for the rest of the game.
• Removal stays available for as many pairs as you like in a row; when you are done clearing, resume drawing and the next stock card appears. Resuming requires at least one empty slot.

A typical crunch: the board is full, and among the sixteen cards sit a 3, a 7, two 5s and a 10. Four removals are available — 3 + 7, the two 5s together, and the lone 10 — freeing five slots in one visit to the removal phase. Whether to take all of them or leave a pair as future insurance is yours to judge; the game lets you resume drawing whenever at least one slot is free.

Every action works by click or drag: drag the card in play to a slot or click the slot; remove a pair by clicking both cards or dragging one onto the other; a lone 10 removes with a single click.

Winning & losing

You win when the stock is empty and no number cards remain on the board — which means all twelve royals are seated on their marked slots and all forty number cards have been removed. There are exactly three ways to lose:

1. Blocked — the visible card is a King, Queen or Jack and every one of its marked slots is occupied. The royal has nowhere legal to go and the game ends on the spot, even if that card was the very last one in the stock.
2. Board full — all sixteen slots are occupied and no removal exists: no two number cards on the board sum to ten and no 10 is present. With nowhere to place and nothing to clear, the game is over.
3. Stuck at the end — the stock is empty but number cards remain on the board with no removals available. The leftover numbers can never be cleared, so the win is out of reach.

Edge cases & fine print

• Removals only unlock when the board is full or the stock is empty. You cannot pre-emptively clear pairs mid-fill while empty slots remain and cards are still coming — placement pressure is the core of the game.
• The removal phase is sticky. Once open, you may remove pair after pair (and lone 10s) before resuming the draw; clearing extra room before dealing again is usually wise.
• Aces are always 1 — they pair only with 9s. 5s pair only with other 5s, and 10s never pair at all; stranding an odd number of 5s late is a classic losing pattern.
• Number cards on marked slots are legal but block royals. A 6 parked on a corner locks out a King until the 6 is paired away — during a phase when removals may not even be available.
• The blocked check happens when placement resumes. After your removals, the visible card is re-examined: a royal with no free marked slot ends the game at that moment.
• The endgame is a clearing puzzle. With the stock empty, placement ends and the game becomes pure removal — you win only if every remaining number card can be paired off.
• The hint plays the long game: it parks number cards on the free centre slots first, squats on marked slots only when nothing else is open, and prefers removing lone 10s. Undo, auto-save and Restart (same stock order) all work as in our other solitaires.
• Progress is measured in removals. The counter runs from 0 to 40; a lost game still tells you how deep you got, and your stats track games played and won.

Variants

We play the cardgames.io solitaire version of Kings in the Corners described above. The name is shared with a quite different game, so be careful when comparing rules:

• Kings Corner / Kings in the Corner (multiplayer) — a 2-4 player game on a cross-shaped layout where players shed a hand onto descending alternating-color piles, kings opening the diagonal corners. Same name, entirely different rules.
• Anytime-removal versions — some digital adaptations allow pairing to ten whenever you like rather than only on a full board; that variant is substantially easier.
• Fifteens and other pairing patiences — the same fill-then-clear skeleton appears with different target sums and grids; the ten-sum 4×4 board with royal seats is the version played here.

Frequently asked questions

Related rulebooks

• Pyramid rules — pair cards to 13 and clear the pyramid
• Addiction rules — fill the gaps, sort the rows — 3 shuffles
• Clock rules — beat the fourth king — 1-in-13 fate
• Golf rules — clear the course one rank at a time