Interregnum

About Interregnum Solitaire

by Thomas Warfield

Screen shot of the game Interregnum from Pretty Good Solitaire.

Interregnum is a rather unique 2 deck game. It doesn't fit into any regular type.

How to Play

There are eight foundation piles. These piles start empty and are to be built up regardless of suit from the rank of first card dealt to the pile, wrapping from King to Ace as necessary, until each pile contains 13 cards.

Above the foundations are eight indicator cards, which are dealt at the start of the game. These cards indicate the top card for the foundation pile directly below it and what the bases of each foundation pile will be. The card in the indicator row is the last card that will be played on the foundation pile below it (which will be done automatically once the first 12 cards are played to the pile). If the indicator card is a Five, for example, then the foundation pile below it must start with a Six and be built up from Seven to King, then Ace to Four, then the indicator card will be played on it.

There are eight tableau piles below the foundations. At the start of the game one card is dealt to each pile. There is no building in these piles, the top card of each pile is available for play on the foundations only.

The objective is to move all of the cards to the foundation piles.

Moving cards to the foundations is most easily done by right clicking on the card, although this will always move the card to the leftmost foundation pile, which in some cases may not be the best move. In fact, this is where skill comes into Interregnum. It is usually best, when there is a choice of foundation piles to move a card to, to move the card to the pile that contains the fewest cards (how many cards are in a pile can be determined by looking at the indicator card above the pile).

The strategy in Interregnum is fairly simple but winning is not necessarily easy. The average player wins about 45% of the time, but much higher scores are possible, particularly if you skip games with very few initial moves.

Variations of Interregnum