Pyramid rules

Setup & the deal

Twenty-eight cards are dealt face up into a pyramid of seven rows: one card in the top row, two in the second, down to seven along the bottom. Each card in rows one through six is overlapped by two cards in the row below it. The remaining 24 cards form the stock, face down beside the pyramid, and the waste pile starts empty.

Card values are fixed: Ace = 1, number cards = face value, Jack = 11, Queen = 12, King = 13. Suits and colors play no role at all. The deal is recorded at the start, so the Restart button replays the identical pyramid and stock order.

How to play

A pyramid card is exposed when both cards overlapping it from the row below are gone. At the deal only the seven bottom-row cards are exposed; each removal frees up cards above. You may remove:

• Two exposed pyramid cards whose ranks sum to 13.
• An exposed pyramid card plus the top waste card, summing to 13.
• A King on its own — from the pyramid (exposed) or from the top of the waste. Kings are worth 13 by themselves and never pair with anything.
• A covering pair — the special case described below.

The covering pair. When exactly one card still covers another and the two sum to 13, you may remove them together — the classic example is playing a 4 onto the 9 it is covering, once the 9 has lost its other coverer. The move works in either direction (click either card first), but it is strictly a pyramid-to-pyramid move: the waste card can never pair with a card that is still covered.

An example of the exposure rule in action: the bottom row holds a 4 and a 5 side by side, and a 9 sits in row six overlapped by both of them. The 4 and the 9 cannot be paired yet — the 9 is covered. Pair the 5 away with an 8 (from the pyramid or the waste) and the 9 is still pinned, but the 4 is now its sole coverer: the covering-pair rule lets you remove the 4 together with the 9 beneath it in a single move, opening the row above.

The stock. Click the face-down stock to turn one card onto the waste; only the top waste card is playable. Cards cannot be played directly off the stock — they must land on the waste first. When the stock is empty, click its slot to flip the whole waste back over as a new stock. Recycling is unlimited, and it never shuffles: every pass through the stock shows the surviving cards in the same order.

Winning & losing

You win the moment the last pyramid card is removed. Whatever is left in the stock and waste is irrelevant — only the pyramid needs clearing.

The game declares a deal dead when two things are true at once: no removal of any kind is playable right now (no exposed King, no exposed pair, no covering pair, no waste-top pair), and no card anywhere in the stock or waste could ever pair with a currently exposed pyramid card. Because recycling is unlimited, every stock and waste card will eventually reach the top of the waste — so if none of them helps now, none ever will, and since removals are the only way to expose new cards, a pyramid that cannot shrink now can never shrink. The check is conservative: it never calls a winnable game lost.

Pyramid is one of the least winnable solitaires under any rules. Unlimited recycling helps enormously compared with strict two-pass versions, but deals where all four of one rank lie buried above all four of their partner rank are simply unsolvable — no amount of cycling brings back a card that was never reachable.

Edge cases & fine print

• The covering pair requires a sole coverer. While both cards below a card remain, it cannot be paired with either of them — the move exists only when exactly one coverer is left.
• Waste pairs only with fully exposed cards. Even when the waste top matches a partly covered card by value, the move is illegal — covering pairs live entirely inside the pyramid.
• Only the top waste card exists. Cards buried in the waste cannot be paired with each other or with anything else until they surface again on a later pass.
• Recycling preserves order. Flipping the waste back over restores the original stock order, minus whatever you removed. Counting the survivors between passes is a core skill.
• The recycle counter is informational. It tracks how many resets you have used for your stats; nothing limits it.
• Kings in the waste are removable with a single click, same as pyramid Kings — but a King sitting harmlessly in the waste costs nothing to leave there.
• Every action counts as a move — removals, draws and recycles all tick the move counter, so a low move count means efficient pairing, not just a lucky deal.
• Card conservation is absolute. The 28 pyramid slots plus the 24 stock cards account for the whole deck; removed cards leave the game entirely and are never redealt.
• Undo, hints and auto-save are all available. The hint prefers removals that shrink the pyramid (waste-only removals do not), knows about covering pairs, and suggests drawing only when a genuinely useful card still exists in the stock or waste.

Variants

We play the cardgames.io ruleset: win by clearing the pyramid only, unlimited stock recycling, and the covering-pair move allowed. Other published versions differ mainly in strictness:

• Strict Pyramid — the stock may be dealt through only once, or recycled at most twice. Win rates drop sharply.
• Full-clear Pyramid — you must empty the pyramid, stock and waste to win, which turns leftover Kings in the waste into real work.
• No-covering-pair versions — many apps only allow pairs of fully exposed cards; the covering move makes a handful of extra deals winnable.
• Scored Pyramid (Microsoft-style) — points per removal with row-clearing and time bonuses; the removal rules underneath are the same.

Frequently asked questions

Related rulebooks

• TriPeaks rules — chain up-or-down streaks over three peaks
• Golf rules — clear the course one rank at a time
• Kings in the Corners rules — seat the royals, pair the rest to ten
• Solitaire rules — the classic klondike patience game