Rules for Shamrocks

Family: La Belle Lucie
Categories: Rewarding
Variants: La Belle Lucie, Trefoil
Also Known As: Three-card Fan

Shamrocks is related to La Belle Lucie, with an identical layout and similar chances of winning. Shamrocks has an advantage if you are short on table space, because the fans are restricted to at most three cards each.

Layout

Shuffle the deck and lay it out in 17 piles of three cards each, with the leftover card alone in an 18th pile of its own. The cards are face up and fanned, so that all can be seen. These are the tableaus. There are also four foundation piles, which start out empty.

While laying out the tableaus, if you place a King above other cards of its own suit, move the King below those cards. (Solitaire Till Dawn will do this for you automatically.)

Play

Top cards of tableaus are available. Tableaus build up or down, regardless of suit, but may contain at most three cards each. Empty tableau piles may not be filled. Foundations are started with Aces, then build up in suit.

Goal

The goal is to move all cards to the foundations.

Tips

Never move the last card from a pile unless it’s to the foundations. Empty piles can’t be filled, so emptying a pile just reduces your chances to move cards among the tableaus.

Build down instead of up, if you can. Try to arrange all piles in “rank down” order: that is, with lower cards on top of higher cards.

Build the foundations evenly. Avoid playing a seven to the foundations until you’ve played all the fives. (Sometimes you’ll have to, of course, to avoid getting stuck.)