King's Corners Solitaire Rules

King's Corners is a solitaire card game—a patience game similar to the more popular Four Seasons form of solitaire. King's Corners is played in several variations and goes by other names, including Kings in the Corner and Kings in the Corners. It is an easy game to learn—even for an inexperienced solitaire player.

King's Corners uses a full 52-card deck. The player begins by shuffling the deck and placing the top five cards face up in a cross pattern, with a single card in the center and one on each of its four sides. These five cards represent the tableaux. The rest of the deck is the stock, or draw pile. The four empty corners formed by the five-card cross are known as the foundations.

Draw one card at a time from the stock and placing it in a discard pile. After each draw, the player attempts to place the card in one of the tableaux or foundations. Cards in the tableaux must go down in value, while the foundation cards must go up in value. The player may begin to use one of the foundations by moving an ace from a tableau, or the discard pile, to the empty foundation. Any card may be played in an empty tableau.

The goal of King's Corners is to place the entire deck in the foundations, thus placing all of the kings in the corners. Players can not redraw once all cards in the stock have been discarded. They may also not remove any card but the top card from the discard pile. One of the most effective strategies for winning involves leaving at least one tableau empty at all times as a place to put cards that can't be placed on any other tableau or foundation.

Variations to King's Corners add additional rules or scoring regulations. One method uses a tableau consisting of 16 cards, arranged in a 4-by-4 grid. In this version, players may only move kings to the corners, queens to the left and right center tableaux, and jacks to the top and bottom center tableaux. Players then fill the remaining tableaux, removing pairs of cards with a total value of 10 to free up the tableaux for additional cards, attempting to play the entire deck without running out of room.