Gaps Solitaire is also known as Addiction Solitaire. The reason for “Gaps” becomes obvious when you see the gaps created on the playing board. The name “Addiction”, well, this game can be quite addictive.
To play Gaps Solitaire by hand, start with a single card deck. Unsurprisingly, next you’ll need to shuffle the deck. Now start dealing the cards out to make 4 rows of 13 cards each. Now remove the Aces from the board and put them aside. The gaps left by the Aces are where the alternate name of this game comes from.
The ultimate goal of Gaps Solitaire is to strategically use the gaps to arrange the cards by suit from left to right in ascending order. For example, one row is nothing but hearts and goes from 2 of hearts, 3 of hearts, and so on.
So how do you win Gaps Solitaire? You may only use the gaps to move cards. A card can be moved to any available gap so long as the following 2 conditions are met. The card to the left of the gap must be:
The exception of course is when the leftmost column is a gap because obviously there is no card to its left. In those cases, you may place a 2 of any suit in the leftmost gap.
When the gap is to the right of a King card, you won’t be allowed to use that gap until you reshuffle the board, so let’s talk about redeals.
In the traditional rules of Gaps Solitaire, you’re allowed to reshuffle the entire board a total of 3 times. In order to do this, simply click the reshuffle card in the lower left corner of the playing board and things will be appropriately rearranged.
If you’re playing by hand, here’s what you do. Start with the first row. Is a 2 the left most card? If it’s not, you pick up the entire row to be redealt. If there is a 2, leave it. Next, go to the card to its immediate right. Is it a 3 and of the same suit? If it is, leave it alone and repeat the process with the next card to the right.
The moment you run into a card that is not 1 hight and of the same suit, you immediately pick up that card along with everything to its right to be placed in the pile of cards to be reshuffled. In other words, say you had the following in one row: 2 of diamonds, 3 of diamonds, 7 of spades, 5 of diamonds, and so on. Technically, the 5 of diamonds is where it’s supposed to be, but because the sequence has been broken, everything starting with the 7 of spades will be picked up for reshuffling.
Once you’ve gone through all rows and have picked the cards up for a redeal, add the Aces back into the pile that needs to be reshuffled. Now reshuffle everything in your hand. Next, place the cards back on the table, such that you have 4 rows of 13 cards. Then, you remove the Aces once again. Those are your new gaps.
If you want, you can change up the rules to be harder or easier. Some variations only give you 10 minutes to get everything done. You can make the game easier (and possibly more fun depending on your goals) by changing the allowed number of redeals to be unlimited. You can also make the game insanely hard by changing the number of allowed redeals to be just 1. 3 is the default, but we think you should play however you want.
If you like this game, be sure to share it. And don’t forget to check out got solitaire for tons more free card games. As always, all of the solitaire games are completely free and there’s never anything to download so you can get playing straight away regardless of whether you’ve got a PC, a Mac, or a smart phone or tablet.