Maze

Maze removes the Kings from the deck and hands you the remaining forty-eight cards spread across a continuous grid with six holes in it, and asks you to slide everything into four ordered suit runs from Ace to Queen.

What makes it better than most games of this shape is that a gap can be filled from either direction — the card above whatever is on its left, or below whatever is on its right. That doubles your options at every hole, and combined with the fact that rows wrap into one another, it turns into a properly satisfying spatial puzzle. Where the six gaps end up at the finish does not matter, which is a small mercy.

The deck is laid out in a grid of six rows, then the Kings are pulled out and discarded, leaving 48 cards and six gaps. A gap accepts either the same-suit card one rank above whatever is to its left, or the same-suit card one rank below whatever is to its right — so gaps can be filled from either side, which is what distinguishes Maze from its relatives. The rows run continuously: the last position of one row connects to the first of the next, and the sixth wraps back to the first. You win when the 48 cards form four suit sequences running Ace to Queen, and it does not matter where the gaps end up.

Being able to fill a gap from either side makes this far more tractable than Gaps, and turns it into a genuine sliding puzzle rather than a one-directional race. The continuous rows are the thing players forget: a card at the end of row three is adjacent to the first card of row four, so runs can and should straddle the row breaks. Six gaps is a lot of mobility — the discipline is not to spend them all in one region of the grid. Because Kings are gone entirely, an Ace has no predecessor and a Queen no successor, which makes the Ace-to-Queen boundaries the natural anchors to build outward from.