Eagle Wing

About Eagle Wing Solitaire

by Thomas Warfield

Screen shot of the game Eagle Wing from Pretty Good Solitaire.

Eagle Wing is a classic game of solitaire with a somewhat unusual tableau.

How to Play

At the start of the game, one card are dealt face up to eight tableau piles, in the form of two wings. Then 13 cards are dealt face up to a reserve pile, called the trunk. Only the top card is visible and available for play on the foundations and tableau.

Then one card is dealt to the first foundation pile. The rank of this card becomes the rank of the foundation base card. The other three cards of this rank are played to start the other foundation piles, and each pile is built up in suit, wrapping from King to Ace, until each pile contains 13 cards. The game is won when all cards are moved to the foundation piles.

The remainder of the deck is dealt face down to the stock, and then the top card of the stock is turned over to form the waste pile. Cards are turned over one at a time to the waste pile by clicking. There are two redeals.

To play, build in the tableau down in suit, wrapping from Ace to King if necessary. Groups of cards in sequence down in suit may be moved as a unit. However, there is an unusual restriction in the tableau: there can be only at most three cards in a tableau pile. You cannot make any builds, whether of one card or multiple cards, that will cause a tableau pile to have more than three cards in it.

Spaces in the tableau are filled automatically from the reserve trunk pile until it is empty, after which spaces may be filled by any card.

Eagle Wing is fairly straightforward to play and can be won by an average player about 80% of time using the standard rules and by a good player nearly every time.

However, there are a number of rules variations that can make the game easier or harder. In Pretty Good Solitaire (Windows), you can go to the Options menu and set the number of cards dealt to the trunk at the start of the game to 13, 15, 17, 19, or 21, therefore making the game harder. You can also set the number of redeals to 0, 1, or 2.

In Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition, or in the Windows Goodsol Solitaire 101, these different rules variations are separated out into 14 different games, such as "Eagle Wing [19 easy]", which has a trunk of 19 cards and 2 redeals. This separation allows each rules variation to have its own high scores in those games, so there are many high scores lists for Eagle Wing in those games. (Note: these bonus games are available only in the full versions of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition and Goodsol Solitaire 101).

Eagle Wing is one of the 850 games in Pretty Good Solitaire.

Variations of Eagle Wing