Miss Milligan Solitaire game info
What makes Miss Milligan interesting according to Peter Arnold, author of The Complete Book of Card Games, is that you can completely recover from a situation that looks hopeless.
- Family: Spider Solitaire Games
- Decks: Two decks (104 cards)
- Game time: Medium
- Change of winning: Medium
Goal
The goal in Miss Milligan Solitaire is to move all cards to the eight foundations piles.
Layout & deal
The eight tableau piles are each dealt one face-up card. The rest of the cards goes face-down into the stock. The foundation piles start empty.
Allowable moves
In the tableau, piles are built by alternating color and in descending order. Correctly ordered groups of cards can be moved as a whole. Empty tableau piles can only be filled with Kings or sequences starting with a King.
Click the stock to deal additional cards to the tableau. They are dealt like in Spider Solitaire: each pile is dealt one face-up card.
Once the stock runs out, a special reserve pile (which behaves more like a free cell such as in FreeCell) appears. You can move any card or correctly ordered sequence of cards onto this reserve pile. This move is called waiving or weaving. If there are already cards on the reserve, you cannot add any additional card to it. You can only move all cards on the reserve pile as a group back onto the tableau, or move them to the foundations one by one.
The foundation piles are built in suit and ascending order, going from Ace to King.
Strategy
- Rearrange the cards as much as possible before dealing new cards from the stock.
- Immediately moving a King to an empty space might not always be the best move. Maybe after dealing some cards from the stock, you will regret moving one King instead of another.
- Never move a card or sequence to the special reserve pile if you are not sure you can move them back. Towards the end of the game you really need the special reserve pile to unblock cards, so make sure you always have a way to clear it.
Variants
- Millie Solitaire: Same as Miss Milligan Solitaire but without reserve.
- Giant Solitaire: No reserve as in Millie, but any card can be moved onto an empty tableau space.
- Milligan Cell Solitaire: Same as Miss Milligan Solitaire but with four free cells.
- Milligan Harp Solitaire: Cross between Miss Milligan Solitaire and Harp Solitaire.
System requirements
Miss Milligan Solitaire can be played in all modern browsers, on all device types (desktop, tablet, mobile), and on all operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, ...).