How to play Addiction Solitaire

Addiction Solitaire — also known as Gaps — is a tidying puzzle rather than a building one. Every card is face-up from the start, so there is nothing hidden and nothing to deal: the whole game is laid out in front of you, and the challenge is to slide it into order before you run out of shuffles. It is quick to learn, surprisingly tense near the end, and genuinely addictive, which is how it earned its name.

Goal

Arrange all four rows so each one runs from the 2 up to the King in a single suit, left to right, with the empty gap left at the right-hand end.

The layout

• The 52 cards are dealt into four rows of thirteen.
• The four Aces are removed before you start, leaving four gaps scattered across the board.

Moves

• A gap can be filled only by the card that is one higher and the same suit as the card immediately to the gap's left. So a gap to the right of the 6 of clubs accepts only the 7 of clubs.
• A gap at the far left of a row can be filled by any 2 — that is how each row gets started.
• A gap to the right of a King (or to the right of another gap) is dead: nothing can fill it until the board is shuffled. Playable cards are highlighted, so click a highlighted card to slide it across.

Shuffles and strategy

When no useful moves remain you can Shuffle, but only a limited number of times. A shuffle keeps the correctly-ordered run at the start of each row, drops a single gap right after it, and re-deals the rest — so the more of each row you have locked into place beforehand, the more a shuffle preserves. That makes the order of your moves matter: try to build the low end of every row (2, 3, 4…) early, and avoid stranding a gap behind a King when a more useful move is available. Get all four rows running cleanly from two to King and the board is solved.