🎩 Canfield
🂡 Cards · 2 playsCanfield
The casino patience: a buried reserve, wrapping foundations, and long odds worth playing.
About Canfield
Canfield takes its name from the Saratoga casino owner who sold the deck at fifty-two dollars and paid five for every card a player could land on the foundations — house odds, as ever, firmly in the house's favour. A dealt card fixes the starting rank of all four foundations, which build upward by suit and wrap from King back to Ace; the tableau builds down in alternating colours, wrapping likewise. A thirteen-card reserve feeds every column you empty, and working that reserve down is the whole strategy, since the cards beneath it are inaccessible any other way.
How to Play
Foundations begin at the dealt rank and build up by suit, wrapping from King to Ace. Tableau columns build down in alternating colours, also wrapping; whole columns may move together. An empty column fills automatically from the reserve — emptying the reserve is the key to the game.
💡 Tips & Strategy
The reserve is the opponent. Thirteen cards, playable only from the top, and the game is won almost exactly as often as the reserve is emptied — so every judgement call should be settled in favour of the move that plays a reserve card or clears the way for one. Tableau tidiness is secondary; the reserve is the clock.
Let columns empty themselves and stay empty briefly. An empty column fills automatically from the reserve, which is the main engine for draining it — so moves that empty a column are worth more than they look, even when the sequence they break was pleasant. Once the reserve is exhausted, spaces become ordinary and precious again.
Mind the wrap in both directions. Foundations begin at the dealt rank, so if the starter is a seven, the sixes are the last cards you need — treat rank distance from the starter, not face value, as a card's true urgency. In the tableau, a king sits happily on an ace; sequences that wrap are easy to overlook when planning, and the wrap frequently offers the move that unsticks a stalled board.
Run through the stock without anxiety but with a memory. It recycles, so nothing there is lost — yet the order is fixed, and a card played out of the middle changes which cards surface together next pass. When a pass yields nothing, the position, not the stock, is stuck: the remedy is usually a tableau rearrangement that changes which waste cards have landing squares, made before you deal again.