What is Shamrocks?
Shamrocks is a fan-layout solitaire with a distinctly different movement rule from the rest of the La Belle Lucie family. Instead of building only by same suit downward between fans, Shamrocks allows any card to be placed on any adjacent-rank card — suit is irrelevant for fan-to-fan moves. This greatly increases the number of legal moves per turn, but adds a constraint: each fan can hold at most three cards. A fan at capacity cannot receive additional cards regardless of rank.
Full rules
The 52-card deck is dealt into seventeen fans of three and one fan of one card. Only the top card of each fan is available. A top card can move to a foundation (building upward by suit, Ace to King) or to any other fan whose top card is one rank higher or lower than the moving card — any suit is accepted for fan-to-fan moves.
Critical constraint: a fan may never hold more than three cards. If a fan already has three cards, no additional card can be placed on it. Empty fans can receive any single card. There are no redeals. Win when all 52 cards reach the foundations.
How Shamrocks differs from La Belle Lucie
La Belle Lucie: same-suit downward building between fans, many legal moves are blocked by suit, empty fans cannot be refilled, two redeals. Shamrocks: any-rank moves between fans, many more legal moves per turn, but the three-card cap means fans saturate quickly and no redeals are available. The extra movement freedom and no-redeal rule roughly cancel out in difficulty compared to La Belle Lucie.
The three-card cap is the defining constraint. Any move that places a fourth card on a fan is illegal — which means long sequences cannot be hidden in fans the way they can in other patience games.
Read the Shamrocks strategy guide →