Classic variant
All four aces are pre-placed on the foundations, and the remaining 48 cards are dealt face-up into eight columns of six. Move only the top card of each column — down in rank regardless of suit. Empty columns accept any card. Build each foundation from Ace to King by suit to win.
Click a top card to select it, then click a destination to move it.
Because every card is visible from the very first move, Beleaguered Castle is a pure planning puzzle. The aces are already on the foundations, giving you a head start — but freeing the 2s quickly is still the critical early challenge.
Move top cards onto columns one rank higher (any suit). Empty columns accept any single card. The four foundations build up by suit from Ace through King. There is no stock, no waste, and no redeals.
Need more detail? Read the Beleaguered Castle strategy guide.
Beleaguered Castle — also called Laying Siege — is one of the oldest open-packer patience games, appearing in nineteenth-century patience literature. It belongs to a family of games with a central foundation strip flanked by columns of tableau cards, a layout that gives the game its military metaphor: the foundations are a castle and the tableau cards are the besieging army.
Related games in the same family include Citadels, Streets and Alleys, and Fortress. Among these, Beleaguered Castle is typically the most difficult because it removes all four Aces from the tableau before dealing — giving the foundations a head start, but making the remaining 48 cards harder to sequence cleanly.
With Aces already on the foundations, the 2s are the immediate next targets. Until all four 2s reach their foundations, no suit can progress beyond the Ace. A 2 buried under five cards in a column of six requires moving all five blockers to other valid positions — which may itself require a chain of prior moves.
The best Beleaguered Castle openings begin by surveying all four 2s and tracing the liberation path for each before making any move. The cheapest liberation (fewest total moves, fewest dependencies) is almost always the right starting point.
Unlike FreeCell or Klondike, Beleaguered Castle builds tableau sequences by rank only — any suit can be placed on any card one rank higher, regardless of color. A 7 of spades can go on an 8 of hearts, clubs, or diamonds.
This creates more legal destinations per card, but it comes with a subtle trap: placing a card on a same-suit card creates a foundation dependency chain where both cards must move in the correct order. When multiple placement options exist, prefer cross-suit placements over same-suit placements to avoid compounding your ordering constraints.