Stock
52 cardsDeal four cards whenever no visible matches remain.
Solitaire variant
Perpetual Motion Solitaire
A deterministic four-pile patience game where every action is forced. Deal four cards, move matching top ranks left, discard completed fours, and find out whether the deal clears or cycles forever.
Seed: 233200Moves: 0Round: 1Stock: 52Discarded: 0/52Timer: 00:00Status: in progress
Deal four cards to begin the first round of Perpetual Motion.
Discard
0 groupsNone
A finished group only leaves play when all four equal ranks stack together.
Next action
Deal FourHint: deal one card to each of the four piles before resolving anything else.
Tableau
Only the top card of each pile matters. Matching ranks collapse left, then completed fours are discarded.
Pile 10 cards
No card
Pile 20 cards
No card
Pile 30 cards
No card
Pile 40 cards
No card
How the deal works
The board uses four tableau piles. You always deal one card to each pile, then collapse equal visible ranks into the leftmost matching pile. Whenever one pile holds all four cards of a rank on top, that group is discarded.
Once the stock is empty, the piles are gathered from right to left and redealt. If that gather step recreates a stock order that appeared before, the game is effectively stuck in a loop and the deal is over.
Related solitaire variants
- Clock Solitaire for another nearly mechanical patience game with almost no player choice.
- Birthday Solitaire if you want short passes through a stock with more planning around recycling order.
- Nestor Solitaire for a more visible matching puzzle where the choices actually matter.
What is Perpetual Motion?
Perpetual Motion is a mechanical patience game with no player choices: every move is forced by the rules, and the outcome is determined entirely by the initial shuffle. The game either clears all 52 cards through a series of forced deal-and-discard cycles, or it enters an infinite loop and never finishes. The only decision the player makes is when to recognize and declare a loop.
The game fascinates players not for tactical depth but for its hypnotic rhythm and the mathematical question it poses with each new deal: will this particular shuffle converge to a clearing, or loop forever?
Full rules
The 52-card deck is dealt face-up into four equal piles of thirteen cards. Each round: check whether any four top cards share the same rank. If they do, remove all four (they are discarded permanently). Then move the top card of each pile onto the pile to its right (the rightmost pile wraps to the leftmost). Repeat: check for matching tops, discard quartets, shift right, until no more moves change the board state.
The game is won when all 52 cards are discarded in quartets. It loops if the four-pile configuration exactly repeats a previous state.
What to watch during play
Progress is visible: each four-of-a-kind removal reduces the total card count by four. A game moving toward a win shows a steady decrease in total cards across rounds. A looping game shows the same card configuration returning — the same ranks on top of the same four piles — which means no further quartets will ever form.
The implementation here tracks cycle states automatically. When a loop is detected, the game stops and reports the outcome rather than running the cycle indefinitely.
Why the outcome varies by shuffle
The mathematical structure of Perpetual Motion means some initial arrangements are provably winning (the rotation-and-discard process will eventually clear the deck) and others are provably looping (a cycle will form that never produces new quartet removals). The winning or looping outcome is determined completely by the initial card order.
This makes Perpetual Motion an unusual object in the solitaire world: not a game of skill, and not quite a game of luck in the usual sense, but a deterministic mathematical process whose result is only revealed by running it to completion.
Related mechanical games
- Clock Solitaire — another fully mechanical patience game with no player choices; outcome determined at deal
- Calculation — mechanical-feeling but with genuine strategy around stock order choices