Rules
Terrace Solitaire rules at a glance
- Two standard 52-card decks are used, for 104 cards.
- Eleven cards are fanned face up as the terrace. Only the exposed end card can be played.
- A terrace card may go to a foundation only. It can never be packed onto the tableau.
- Four cards are offered. The one you take sets the base rank for all eight foundations.
- Nine tableau piles start with one face-up card each.
- Foundations build up from the base rank in alternating colours and turn the corner from king to ace.
- Each foundation is finished at thirteen cards.
- Tableau piles build down in alternating colours and also turn the corner from ace to king.
- Only one card moves at a time. Packed sequences never travel together.
- The top card of a tableau pile and the top card of the waste may go to a foundation or a tableau pile.
- An empty tableau pile is refilled at once from the waste, or from the stock if the waste is empty.
- The stock deals one card at a time to the waste. There is no redeal.
- You win by moving all 104 cards to the eight foundations.
How to play
How to play Terrace Solitaire
Terrace begins before you move a card. Eleven cards are fanned along the top of the board, then four more are dealt as candidates. You choose one of those four, and its rank becomes the starting rank for every foundation in the game. The three you leave behind stay on the table as tableau cards, and the rest of the nine-pile row is dealt from the stock.
From there the game runs on two opposite movements. Foundations climb from the base rank in alternating colours: red, black, red, black, all the way to thirteen cards. Tableau piles run the other way, packing down in alternating colours. Both directions ignore suit entirely and both wrap around the ends of the deck, so a king can sit above an ace on a foundation and a king can sit below an ace in the tableau.
The terrace is the pressure. Every one of its eleven cards is face up, so you always know what is coming, and each one has exactly one legal destination: a foundation that wants that rank in that colour. You cannot store a terrace card, tuck it into the tableau, or pass it to the waste. The tableau's real job is to keep foundations advancing so the terrace can drain.
Background
What is Terrace Solitaire?
Terrace is a two-deck patience game built around a visible reserve. The fanned row that gives the game its name looks like a terrace of steps, and the layout has been printed under several titles: Queen of Italy is the most common alternative, and older collections sometimes call it Signora. The family also includes Blondes and Brunettes, Falling Star, General's Patience, and Thirteen, all of which keep the reserve-row idea while shifting the numbers around it.
What separates Terrace from most reserve games is the bargain it strikes. It gives you perfect information about the reserve, which almost no other classic game does, and then takes away your ability to do anything clever with it. A Canfield reserve can feed the tableau. A FreeCell cell can hold a blocker. A Terrace reserve does neither. Knowing exactly which eleven cards are waiting is useful only if you can build foundations fast enough to receive them.
Setup
The layout on this page
The board shows the stock and waste on the left, the eight foundations to their right, the eleven-card terrace fanned across the middle, and the nine tableau piles below. Each empty foundation displays the rank it is waiting for, and each started foundation shows a small badge with the next rank and whether it must arrive red or black.
Card counts work out as eleven in the terrace, one on the first foundation, nine in the tableau, and 83 in the stock. The counters above the board track the base rank, foundation progress out of 104, terrace cards left, stock size, tableau size, and moves.
Availability
Which cards can you actually move?
Three sources are live at any moment: the exposed end card of the terrace, the top card of the waste, and the top card of each of the nine tableau piles. Everything else is visible but locked, including the ten terrace cards behind the exposed one.
Destinations are narrower than sources. The waste card and tableau top cards can go to a foundation or to another tableau pile. The terrace card can only go to a foundation. Selecting a terrace card and then clicking a tableau pile will always be refused, no matter how neatly the ranks line up.
Opening
Choosing the base rank
The four candidate cards are dealt face up in the first four tableau positions, and the game will not start until you take one. This is the single most important decision in the deal, and it is worth spending a moment on before clicking.
Look at the terrace first. If four or five of the eleven terrace cards share a rank or sit one or two steps above your candidate rank, those cards can leave the row early, and an early exit is worth far more than a late one. Then look at the nine tableau cards for the same reason: a base rank with several copies already on the table means several foundations can open quickly, and eight open foundations give every later card somewhere to go.
Middle ranks such as 6, 7, and 8 tend to be the most forgiving because the wrap point lands far away from the cards you need first. A base of king or ace pushes the wrap right to the start, which sounds tidy but means the second card on every foundation is a rank that is easy to bury. There is no single correct answer here; the point is that the four candidates are rarely equal, and treating the choice as a coin flip throws away the game's best decision.
Moves
Legal and illegal Terrace moves
Foundations take the next rank up in the opposite colour of their current top card. If a foundation shows the red 7, only a black 8 continues it, and either black 8 in the two decks will do. Suit never matters; only rank and colour do.
Tableau piles take the next rank down in the opposite colour. A red 9 accepts either black 8. Because the tableau turns the corner, an ace also accepts a black or red king, whichever contrasts with it. Only the single top card of a pile can move, so a tidy run of five packed cards has to be dismantled one card at a time.
FoundationWith 7s as the base, the black 8 goes on a red 7
FoundationA red ace follows a black king, because foundations turn the corner
TableauThe black 6 packs onto a red 7
TableauA black king packs onto a red ace, going down around the corner
IllegalThe terrace card onto a tableau pile, at any time
IllegalA red 8 onto a red 7 on a foundation, because the colour repeats
Foundations
How the eight foundations work
All eight foundations share one base rank, and each one runs thirteen cards from that rank. The first card on an empty foundation only has to match the base rank; colour is free at that point. Every card after it must alternate. If 7s are the base, one foundation might run red 7, black 8, red 9, black 10 and so on, while its neighbour runs black 7, red 8, black 9, red 10.
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That sequence is a full foundation with 7s as the base: seven up to king, around the corner through the ace, and finishing on the 6. Because two decks are in play, every rank and colour combination you need exists twice, which is the main reason Terrace is playable at all.
Keep an eye on how evenly the eight foundations advance. Two foundations of the same colour pattern racing ahead is usually a warning sign: it means one colour of a given rank is being consumed twice while the other colour piles up with nowhere to go.
Reserve
Why the terrace is a one-way street
The terrace can only shrink through foundations, so its eleven cards effectively set the shape of the whole deal. A terrace whose exposed end holds a card three ranks above the base will sit untouched until three other cards climb ahead of it.
Because the row is fanned face up, you can plan around it. Read it from the exposed end backwards and note where the base rank appears. Those cards are the milestones. Every tableau move you make should ideally shorten the distance to the next one.
Stock
Stock, waste, and the single pass
The stock deals one card at a time to the waste, and there is no redeal on this page. Once a card is covered in the waste, it is out of reach until the covering card moves, which in practice usually means it is gone.
The waste is also the refill source for tableau spaces, so it does double duty. Before drawing, check whether the current waste card can start a foundation, extend a tableau pile, or is worth keeping on top while you make a board move instead.
Spaces
Spaces refill themselves, and that is a tool
In most tableau games an empty column is storage. In Terrace it is a vending machine. The moment a pile empties, the top waste card drops in, or the next stock card if the waste is empty. You never get to decide what fills the space, and you cannot leave it open.
That changes how you think about clearing a pile. Emptying a short pile is a way to pull a fresh card onto the board without spending a stock draw on the waste, which matters when the waste already holds something you want to keep available. It is also a way to get rid of a waste card you cannot use, by letting it land in a tableau position where it can at least be built on later.
The catch arrives at the end. Once the stock and the waste are both exhausted, nothing is left to fill a space, so a pile that empties late stays empty for good. In the closing stage of a deal, clearing a pile completely is often the move that ends the game.
Strategy
Terrace Solitaire strategy
Play the terrace first, always. If the exposed terrace card has a legal foundation move, it is almost always right to take it immediately, even ahead of a foundation move from the tableau. A tableau card will still be there in ten moves; the terrace card is blocking ten others.
Open all eight foundations early. Any base-rank card that appears in the tableau or the waste should usually go up straight away, because a foundation that has not started cannot accept anything, and eight live foundations roughly double the number of ranks the board can absorb at once.
Build the tableau in service of the terrace, not for tidiness. A long, elegantly packed pile of eight alternating cards is worth very little in Terrace, because only its top card can move and nothing underneath will surface soon. Short piles with useful top cards beat long ordered runs every time.
Watch colour balance before you commit a card. If both black 9s have already gone to foundations and both red 9s are buried, every red 8 on your board has lost its foundation route for a long while. Terrace punishes colour tunnel vision more than most games because every foundation step is a colour decision.
Hold the waste card when it is the only thing that can take a rank you will need shortly. With one pass and no redeal, the waste is the last chance for a lot of cards, and drawing over a useful card is the most common way a promising Terrace deal quietly dies.
Mistakes
Common Terrace mistakes
- Treating the base-rank choice as random instead of reading the terrace first.
- Leaving a playable terrace card in place to make a neat tableau move.
- Building long packed piles that bury the cards the foundations need.
- Emptying a tableau pile after the stock is gone, killing the space permanently.
- Drawing over a waste card that was the only home for a rank on the board.
- Forgetting that foundations wrap, and stalling a pile at the king.
- Sending both copies of a rank in one colour up while the opposite colour has no route.
Winnability
Is Terrace Solitaire winnable?
Not reliably. Terrace is generally regarded as one of the tougher classic two-deck games, and the reasons are structural rather than bad luck: the reserve has exactly one destination type, the foundations demand an exact rank and colour, sequences never move as a unit, and the stock runs once.
This page does not quote a win rate. Any honest number would have to be measured against this exact version, including the four-card base choice, automatic space refills, single stock pass, and the undo and hint behaviour used here. Borrowing a figure from a different Terrace ruleset would be misleading.
A realistic goal on a first pass is to clear the terrace rather than to clear the deck. Emptying that row is the genuine achievement in this game.
Variants
Terrace variants and house rules
The Terrace family is a good example of how patience games drift. Nearly every published version keeps the fanned reserve and the alternating-colour foundations, then adjusts the reserve size, the tableau width, or whether the base card is chosen or dealt.
Queen of ItalyThe most common alternate name for Terrace itself. Some books also print it as Signora. Same eleven-card terrace, same chosen base rank.
Blondes and BrunettesA shorter opening. The terrace holds ten cards, the tableau holds nine, and the first foundation card is simply the next card off the deck instead of a choice.
Falling StarPlays like Terrace but the terrace is dealt eleven cards and the tableau row is dealt nine, with the base card turned rather than picked.
General's PatienceDrops the alternating-colour foundation rule and builds each foundation up in suit instead. That change makes the terrace far harder to spend.
ThirteenScales the whole game up: a thirteen-card terrace and eleven tableau piles, which gives more targets but also more cards to keep alive.
Two house rules turn up often enough to be worth naming. Some versions let cards be moved from a foundation back to the tableau, which makes the game far easier and removes most of the colour-balance tension. Others allow a second pass through the stock. This page uses neither: foundations are one-way, and the stock deals once.
Comparison
How Terrace compares with Canfield, Duchess, and Forty Thieves
Canfield is the closest cousin in spirit. It also pairs a reserve with a base rank that is not an ace, and it also refills tableau spaces from the reserve. The difference is direction of travel: a Canfield reserve card can drop into the tableau and wait there, while a Terrace card cannot. That one rule is why Canfield feels flowing and Terrace feels tight.
Duchess shares the choice rather than the reserve. It offers the top cards of four fans and lets you name the base rank from among them, exactly the sort of opening decision Terrace makes. If you enjoy that moment more than the rest of the game, Duchess gives it to you in a smaller, faster package.
Forty Thieves is the size comparison. Both use two decks, eight foundations, single-card moves, and a one-pass stock, and both are unforgiving. Forty Thieves gets its difficulty from strict same-suit tableau building with no reserve at all, while Terrace loosens the tableau to alternating colours and then hands you eleven cards you can barely touch. They are hard in opposite ways, which makes them a good pair to alternate between.