Royal Rendezvous is three races per suit, run at three different speeds.
Most two-deck alternating-parity games give each suit two foundations of equal length. Royal Rendezvous gives each suit three foundations of unequal length — a 13-card Upper Aces run, a 7-card Lower Aces run, and a 6-card Deuce run — all drawing from the same 16-cell reserve and the same single pass through the stock. The skill here is tracking which of a suit’s three foundations is actually the bottleneck, since the other two can finish with cards to spare while the third stalls on a single missing rank.
Last updated: August 2026
Three foundation tiers, one shuffled deal
Royal Rendezvous deals twelve foundations from two shuffled 52-card decks — three per suit:
- Upper Aces — A → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → 7 → 8 → 9 → 10 → J → Q → K. A complete, ordinary 13-card run.
- Lower Aces — A → 3 → 5 → 7 → 9 → J → K. Seven cards: the Ace, then every rank at an odd position in the standard sequence.
- Deuces — 2 → 4 → 6 → 8 → 10 → Q. Six cards: the Deuce, then every rank at an even position.
13 + 7 + 6 = 26 cards per suit, times four suits, equals 104 — the entire two-deck pack. Every card has exactly one legal foundation once its foundation reaches the rank below it, which means the interesting decision in this game is never where a card goes, but which of a suit’s three races is worth clearing a path for first.
The orphaned second Deuce
Each suit starts with two Aces and two Deuces in the shuffled pack. Both Aces become foundation bases — one for Upper Aces, one for Lower Aces — but only one Deuce becomes a foundation base. The second Deuce of each suit has no foundation of its own to start on; it is dealt into the reserve or stock like any ordinary card, and its only legal destination for the rest of the game is that suit’s Upper Aces foundation, as the second card played after the Ace.
If a suit’s Upper Aces foundation is still sitting on its Ace, it is waiting on a 2 — and there are two candidate 2s in the pack: the dedicated Deuce-foundation base (already placed and irrelevant to Upper Aces) and the orphaned second Deuce, buried somewhere in the reserve, waste, or stock. Until that specific card surfaces, the Upper Aces foundation for that suit cannot move at all, no matter how many 3s, 4s, or 5s of that suit are sitting face-up in the reserve.
Track each suit as three foundations, not one
Because a suit’s three foundations run at different lengths and start from different ranks, they very rarely need the same card at the same time — Upper Aces needs a 2 while Lower Aces needs a 3, for instance. That independence is exactly why it is easy to lose track: a King of spades sitting in the reserve might be needed by the Lower Aces foundation (its final card, after a 9) while being completely useless to Upper Aces (which is still four cards away from it) and to Deuces (which never uses a King at all, since its run stops at Q).
Before deciding whether to play a card or leave it in the reserve, check all three of its suit’s foundations, not just the nearest one. A card that looks stuck against the Upper Aces foundation may be exactly what the Lower Aces or Deuce foundation for that suit needs next.
Sixteen open cells, one refill source, zero redeals
The reserve deals 16 cards face-up in two rows of eight, and every one of them is playable at all times — there is no stacking and nothing hidden. When a reserve cell empties, it refills immediately from the top of the waste pile only; if the waste is empty at that moment, the cell stays dark until a later draw puts a new card on the waste. The stock is dealt through exactly once, with no redeal at all.
That combination rewards a specific order of operations: clear every legal reserve move and every legal waste-top move before drawing again. A card that sits on top of the waste when you draw is buried under the next stock card for the remainder of the single pass, and a reserve cell that could have caught that waste-top card instead stays empty and useless until the next draw happens to refill the waste.
Reserve cell 12 was just emptied by a foundation play, and the waste pile is currently empty too — cell 12 stays dark. You draw from the stock: the new card lands on the waste, not directly in cell 12. If that card is not itself playable to a foundation, the correct next move is to play it into cell 12 from the waste before drawing again, so the reserve regains a fourth possible source of foundation moves instead of leaving that card to be buried by the next draw.
Where Royal Rendezvous games are lost
- Chasing the wrong tier.Spending attention on a suit’s Upper Aces foundation while its Lower Aces or Deuce foundation for the same suit has an available card sitting untouched wastes moves that could have finished a shorter foundation outright.
- Losing track of the orphaned second Deuce.Forgetting that a suit’s Upper Aces foundation cannot move past its Ace until the specific non-foundation Deuce of that suit turns up means every other card of that suit piles up uselessly in the reserve waiting for a foundation slot that is not yet open.
- Drawing before clearing every reserve and waste move. With no redeal, any card left on the waste when you draw again — or any reserve cell left dark that a waste-top card could have filled — is a permanently lost opportunity for the rest of that single stock pass.
- Treating all sixteen reserve cells as equally safe to ignore. Because reserve cells refill only from the waste, letting several cells sit empty at once during a long streak of unplayable waste cards shrinks your options exactly when the stock is running low and there are fewer stock cards left to eventually refill them.