Good news, Solitaire lovers! The hit mobile game, Churchill Solitaire by Donald Rumsfeld has now made it its way not only to iOS players, but Android users also. The game, which saw over 650,000 downloads on the iOS app store, making it the fifth most downloaded app in the app store the week it launched became a quick favorite among solitaire lovers for the devilishly hard twist the game includes.
Churchill Solitaire For Android Gameplay Rules: How To Play
Churchill Solitaire shares similarities with the classic “Patience” solitaire game if it were played with two decks. The two decks give you eight homes stacks or “victory piles” instead of the standard four. You have ten columns stacking deeper inward so that you end up with an inverted isosceles triangle of columns.
You can move cards between these columns, building down on each other with alternating red and black cards. Aces are low. When an ace is free, you can start a home stack and build upwards in that suit. The object of the game is to build both sets of four suits from the Ace up to the King.
If you are out of moves, you can deal out a new layer of 9 cards to go over top all available columns that don’t begin with a King. If you get to the bottom of your deal deck and have no other available moves, you’ve lost.
Now here’s the twist. There’s this damned Devil’s six. This is a set of six cards that are stuck at the top of your board and cannot be played on the columns. The can ONLY be played on the victory piles. If you don’t play them you can’t win, and boy are they a bugger.
Sound tricky? It is! The best way to understand how to play is simply to play the game and see how far you can get.
When the game first came to iOS I played it pretty obsessively and discovered a few tips and tricks for winning campaigns which you can check out here, though you should know ahead of time, not every hand can absolutely be won.
According to the Washington Post, Rumsfeld learned the game from a protégé of Churchill. Legend has it that the British prime minister played the card game throughout World War II – particularly when he was having trouble sleeping. The game helped Churchill improve his strategic thinking. The game is sure to do the same for you if your patient enough to keep at it.
The game was created by Rumsfeld as a way to bring the enjoyment of it to others around the world, but also to raise money for wounded U.S. military veterans and the families of the fallen.
In response to the overwhelming success of the game, Rumsfeld told the press,
“I was delighted that Churchill Solitaire received such a warm reception when we launched the game six months ago … [but] the single most frequent request and question we’ve received over the last six months is for the Android version. We now can put the most challenging game of solitaire ever devised in the hands of more than 1.5 billion active Android users worldwide … The game will now live on for future generations, and continue to generate revenues that will help wounded U.S. military veterans and the families of the fallen.”
The Churchill Solitaire is available now for free on Android devices via the Google Play store. Click here to download the Google Play version now.
