Cruel

Cruel is named accurately. Twelve piles of four, the Aces already up as foundations, one card moved at a time onto the next higher card of its suit — and a redeal you can take as often as you like, which never shuffles anything.

That last detail is the whole game. Gathering the piles up and dealing them out again in fours changes which cards are on top, but the underlying order is exactly as it was, so the supply of genuinely new positions is finite and shrinking. Every move you fail to spot before redealing is one you may never get back. It is a game about exhausting a position completely, and it does not forgive impatience.

The four Aces come out as foundations and the other 48 cards go into twelve piles of four. Only the top card of each pile is available. You may move it onto the next higher card of the same suit in another pile, or up to its foundation. One card at a time, always. When you stall, you may redeal: the piles are gathered up left to right, in their existing order, and dealt out again in fours — without any shuffling. So a redeal rearranges which cards sit on top without changing the underlying sequence at all, and if it produces no new move the game is over.

The redeal is free and unlimited, which sounds generous until you understand that it does not shuffle. The order is fixed; all a redeal does is re-partition it into different groups of four, and there are only so many useful partitions. So the real skill is squeezing every available move out of a position before redealing, because each redeal you spend without changing anything brings you closer to a dead stop. Getting low cards onto foundations early is what actually alters the sequence, and altering the sequence is the only way to make the next redeal worth taking.