Play Pile Up Solitaire Online for Free (No Signup Required)

Forget suits and foundations: sort all 52 face-up cards across fifteen columns until each pile holds four of a kind. Two empty columns are your only room to maneuver.

Pile Up Solitaire is a sorting puzzle rather than a traditional building game: instead of arranging cards by suit into foundations, you simply gather them by rank. The whole deck is dealt face-up across the table, there is no stock to draw from and nothing hidden, so every game is a pure test of logic. Once the cards are down, winning or losing is entirely in your hands.

The deal spreads all 52 cards over fifteen columns. Thirteen of them start with four cards each, and two are left empty. Your goal is to reorganise the layout, one move at a time, until every occupied column holds four cards of a single rank — four Kings in one, four Sevens in another, and so on. Because a column can never hold more than four cards and only accepts a card of matching rank, the two empty columns are the engine of the whole puzzle: they are the free space you use to shuffle stubborn cards out of the way.

Skill is everything here. A careful player looks several moves ahead, avoiding the trap of filling both empty columns too early and stranding cards that can no longer be sorted. Same-rank cards can be picked up and moved as a group, which speeds up the tidy-up once a rank is nearly complete. There is no luck once the deal is on the table, so a game that seems hopeless can almost always be rescued by backing up and trying a cleaner order of moves. This game is also known as "Fifteen Puzzle," "Pileon," and "Pile Sort."

If you enjoy open, skill-based games like this, try FreeCell or Spider Solitaire, and of course the original Solitaire.

If you run into anything odd or have an idea that would make the game better, please contact me.

Enjoy playing!

How to play Pile Up Solitaire

Layout:

15 tableau piles: Thirteen piles are dealt four face-up cards each and two are left empty. No pile may ever hold more than four cards.

Tableau:

A card can be added to a pile only if it matches the rank of that pile's top card; suit is ignored, so the only card that can go on a 10 is another 10. Cards of the same rank may be moved together from one column to another. Any card can be placed into an empty column. Because each pile is capped at four cards, the game is won when every non-empty pile contains all four cards of one rank.