Flower Garden

Flower Garden gives you six beds of six cards and a bouquet of sixteen, and the bouquet is entirely face up and entirely available — all sixteen, all game. Few patience games hand you that much open information.

The cost is that the beds build down with suit ignored, which makes them easy to clog and difficult to untangle, and only their top cards ever come free. So the game becomes a question of husbanding a large open hand against six piles that will happily swallow it. Skilled play clears better than one in five, and it goes by some very old names — The Bouquet, The Garden, Le Parterre.

Six columns — the flower beds — hold six cards each, and the sixteen cards left over form the bouquet, a reserve in which every single card is available at all times. That is the game's defining feature: a sixteen-card open hand. The beds build down with suit ignored, an emptied bed takes any card, and the foundations build up by suit from Ace. Only the top card of each bed is playable, but the whole bouquet always is.

A sixteen-card fully-visible reserve is an enormous amount of information and the game lives on using it well. Read the bouquet first and work out which Aces and low cards are sitting in it versus buried in the beds — freeing the Aces is the stated general aim. Because the beds build down regardless of suit, they are easy to fill and hard to unpick, so resist dumping bouquet cards into them just to tidy up. An empty bed accepts any card and is the most valuable thing you can create. Skilful players clear more than one game in five.