Garden Golf Solitaire

Why a garden mini-golf course?

Golf solitaire already keeps score like golf. Every card you can’t clear is a stroke, a round has nine holes, and the lowest score wins. So we gave it a course to play on.

Each hole has its own little green and flag, from Daisy Tee to Old Oak. There’s a pencil scorecard under the table. Beat par and your score gets a circle, the way golfers mark a birdie. Clear the whole table and the ball drops into the cup.

A bit of real golf solitaire history

Golf is a patience game for one pack of 52 cards. You lay out seven columns of five cards, all face up, and turn one more card to start a single pile. The other 16 cards are the stock.

The game is older than its name. A patience called One Foundation, with the same aim of building every card onto one pile, appears in Games of Patience, a 1905 book published by De La Rue under the pen name Tarbart. The card games writer David Parlett gives One Foundation as another name for Golf. Who first called it Golf, and when, isn’t clear.

The name comes from the scoring. You count the cards left on the table as strokes, and you play nine deals as nine holes. Some rule books put par for a nine-hole round at 45. Clear the table and each card still in the stock counts as minus one.

Standard Golf is strict. A King ends a run, because nothing can go on it, and King and Ace don’t join. A variant called Putt Putt lets the ranks turn the corner, so a King and an Ace can follow each other. TriPeaks and Black Hole use the same one-up-or-one-down play with different layouts.

How to play

• Tap the front card of any column to play it onto the pile. It has to be one rank higher or lower than the top card, in any suit. On a 6 you can play a 5 or a 7.
• A run can change direction, like 4, 5, 6, 5, 4.
• When nothing fits, tap the deck. Its next card goes on the pile and you carry on from there. There’s no second pass through the deck.
• The hole ends when the deck is empty and no card fits. Each card left on the table is one stroke.
• Classic rules are the standard ones: nothing on a King, no wrap from King to Ace. Wrap rules are easier: a Queen or an Ace can go on a King, and a King or a 2 on an Ace.
• Play the 30 courses in order, or the daily course, which changes at midnight Singapore time.
• Undo is free. If you want a stricter game, Tour rules make each undo cost a stroke.

How par and stars work

Before any hole went on the course, a computer solver played it every possible way to find the lowest score. The solver gets to see the order of the deck, which you can’t, so its best is hard to match. Par for each hole is that best score plus 2.

You get 3 stars for a score under par, 2 for par and 1 for anything over. Every course starts with its gentlest hole and ends with its toughest. We measured that by how far a player who can’t see the deck usually falls behind the solver. Later courses are a little tougher again.

Tips

Look before you play. If two cards fit, check what each one leads to. The longest run you can see is usually the right one.

Dig out the deep columns. Cards at the back of a column only come free once the cards in front have gone. A run that empties part of a crowded column is worth more than one that tidies a short column.

Be careful with Kings in Classic. Playing a King stops the run dead, and you’ll have to turn a card. Save it for the end of a run.

Your turn

Course 1 starts at Daisy Tee, the easiest hole on the list. Tee off at the top of this page and see how many strokes you can save.