Play Scorpion Solitaire — Free

What is Scorpion Solitaire?

Scorpion Solitaire is a one-deck patience game in the same family as Spider, played with a single standard 52-card deck. Forty-nine of those cards are dealt into seven columns of seven, some of them face down, and the last three cards are set aside as a small reserve. Your goal is to build four complete sequences, each running from King all the way down to Ace in a single suit, right inside the columns — there are no foundation piles to send cards to. Gather all four King-to-Ace runs and the deal is solved. The game takes its name from the way a scorpion carries its sting in its tail: the cards you most want are usually buried deep, and prising them loose is the whole challenge.

What sets Scorpion apart from its cousins is a wonderfully liberal move rule. In most tableau games you may only shift a card, or a neatly ordered run, but here you can pick up any face-up card along with every card resting on top of it — no matter how jumbled that pile is — and carry the whole clump to a new home. That freedom turns each column into a knot you can loosen a little at a time, sliding disordered stacks around until a suit finally lines up. On vygam it plays instantly in your browser with tap-to-move controls that feel natural on a phone or a laptop, an undo button, a timer and a running move count, so you can dip in for a quick attempt or settle down to untangle a stubborn board.

How to Play Scorpion Solitaire

When you run out of good moves, tap Deal reserve once to drop the three spare cards face up onto the bottom of the three leftmost columns. A move is blocked and simply will not happen when:

• you drop a group onto a card that is not the same suit and exactly one rank higher (colour alone is not enough — the suits must match);
• you try to move a group onto an empty column whose bottom card is not a King;
• you try to lift a face-down card — only face-up cards, and the pile above them, can be moved;
• you tap the reserve after it has already been dealt — the three spare cards come out only once per game.

Nothing you do is permanent. Tap Undo to step back through your moves one at a time — including the reserve deal — so you can always rewind a line that has stalled and try a different order, or start a fresh New game whenever you like.

Scorpion Solitaire Tips & Strategy

Scorpion rewards patience and reading the board far more than luck. Because you can move any pile, the danger is not running out of moves but making messy ones — these habits keep your columns untangling instead of knotting up.

1. Free the face-down cards first

   Hidden cards are what really block a Scorpion deal, and they only sit in the four leftmost columns. Every move that lifts the last face-down card off the bottom of a column flips it up and hands you fresh information, so prize open those buried cards early. A move that merely shuffles cards you can already see is rarely worth making on its own.

2. Build in suit, and keep runs together

   Only a same-suit card one rank higher will accept a group, so every drop is a chance to knit part of a suit sequence. Whenever you can place a card onto its own suit rather than parking it somewhere neutral, do it — you are quietly assembling a King-to-Ace run. Try not to bury a low card of a suit under off-suit clutter you will have to dig out again later.

3. Guard your Kings and empty columns

   An empty column is priceless because it is the only place a King — and the whole tail beneath it — can move, letting you relocate an awkward stack while you work underneath. Aim to clear a short column, then resist filling it with junk; hold it open for a King you are trying to free, or as breathing room to reorder a tangle you could not otherwise touch.

4. Save the reserve for a real dead end

   The three reserve cards deal only once, and they land on the bottom of the three leftmost columns whether that helps or not. Dealing early can bury a promising run under cards you did not need yet. Squeeze out every legal move first — flip your face-down cards, tidy your suits — so that when you finally tap Deal reserve, those three cards fall onto the best possible spots.

The Deal, the Reserve & Winning

Every game of Scorpion uses one shuffled 52-card deck. Forty-nine cards go to the tableau — seven columns of seven — and the layout is deliberately uneven: in the four leftmost columns the top three cards are dealt face down, so twelve hidden cards stand between you and the board, while the three rightmost columns are dealt entirely face up. That asymmetry is the source of the difficulty, because your winning runs almost always need cards that begin the game out of sight. The remaining three cards form the reserve, a one-shot lifeline you control with the Deal button.

Unlike Klondike or FreeCell, Scorpion has no foundations off to the side — you complete each suit right where it lies. A run is finished when a column holds a clean King, Queen, Jack, ten, nine and so on down to the Ace, all of one suit, in order. Because there are four suits and seven columns, a solved board shows four full thirteen-card runs and three empty columns. The moment all four King-to-Ace sequences are in place the deal is won, your fastest clears build up a win count saved in your browser, and you can chase a tidier, quicker solve on the very next shuffle. It is a game you can learn in a minute and keep getting better at for a long time.

Scorpion vs Other Solitaire Games

If you already enjoy Spider Solitaire, Scorpion will feel familiar and yet refreshingly different. Both games chase King-to-Ace runs by suit, but their move rules are mirror images: Spider only lets you relocate a run that is already in perfect order, whereas Scorpion lets you scoop up a whole disordered pile and carry it anywhere it legally fits. That single change flips the puzzle from careful stacking into patient untangling, and it means Scorpion uses just one deck instead of Spider's two. Fans of FreeCell will recognise the pure-skill, open-planning feel, though Scorpion hides some cards and offers no free cells — your only extra resource is the empty column and the three-card reserve.

Compared with classic Solitaire, where you draw endlessly from a stock and build foundations up from the Aces, Scorpion is tighter and more deliberate: there is no waste pile to riffle through and no lucky draw to bail you out, so a win is earned through reading the board. And where a light game like Golf Solitaire is a quick, breezy race to clear the table, Scorpion is a slower, more thoughtful knot to work loose. Learning all four gives you a full toolkit of patience games — from the relaxed to the cerebral — and Scorpion sits proudly at the strategic end.

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