🦂 Scorpion Solitaire
🂡 Cards · 0 playsScorpion Solitaire
Build four suits in place, moving any face-up card no matter what lies upon it.
About Scorpion Solitaire
Scorpion belongs to the Spider family but plays its own game: the aim is four complete runs from King to Ace, each in a single suit, assembled within the columns themselves. Any face-up card may be picked up along with everything above it — in any order, matching or not — but it may land only on the card one rank higher in its own suit. That single landing rule creates the game's celebrated trap: a card sitting on the card it needs forms a block no shuffle will undo, and spotting these knots before tightening them is the craft. Three reserve cards arrive late in the game, and the sting is that they rarely help.
How to Play
Move any face-up card, with everything piled on it, onto the next higher card of the same suit. Only a King may be moved to an empty column; face-down cards turn when cleared. Assemble four complete King-to-Ace suits in place to win — and beware covering a card with its own predecessor.
💡 Tips & Strategy
Scorpion is lost by self-inflicted blocks, so learn the shape of the fatal one: a card lying anywhere on top of the card one rank higher in its own suit — the jack of spades sitting on the queen of spades. The jack must eventually land on that queen, and no legal move can ever put the queen back above the jack in that column... unless the pile can be lifted elsewhere. Before every move, scan what the move covers; making these knots is how the game punishes speed.
Turn the face-down cards early and stop at nothing reasonable to do it. Only three columns hold hidden cards, and the whole left side of the game is excavating them; a move that turns a card is worth several that shuffle known cards. The three-card reserve at the end is famous for arriving too late — play as if it were not coming.
Build from the kings downward deliberately. Kings cannot land on anything, so a king buried mid-column is a wall that only moving the pile above it can breach; give kings empty columns when spaces appear, and grow each suit run in place on top of them. A run assembled low in a column under junk is work you will do twice.
Use the wide-open movement rule as a lockpick, not a toy. Lifting a jumbled pile costs nothing but must achieve something: expose a needed card, reunite a suit pair in the right order, or clear a column. And prefer moves that keep two suits' progress alive over perfecting one — the win needs all four assembled, and the fourth suit is always the one that was neglected while the first was polished.