Match pairs that sum to 13
Take the 28-card pyramid apart by pairing exposed cards that total exactly 13 — Kings leave alone. Work through the 24-card stock, budget your redeals (two on Easy, one on Medium, none on Hard), and chase the roughly 1-in-30 clear.
Pyramid Solitaire is built around a single piece of arithmetic: every pair you remove must total exactly 13. Twenty-eight cards are dealt into seven overlapping rows — one card at the crown, seven along the base — and the whole structure has to come down pair by pair before you run out of material.
The values are fixed and quickly memorized. Aces count 1, number cards their face value, Jacks 11, Queens 12, and Kings 13. Because a King hits the target on its own, it is removed solo — the only free move in the game. Everything else needs a partner: Ace with Queen, 2 with Jack, 3 with 10, 4 with 9, 5 with 8, and 6 with 7. Those six combinations cover the entire deck.
Position matters as much as arithmetic. A pyramid card is playable only when it is exposed, meaning both cards overlapping it from the row below are already gone. Just the seven base cards start exposed, so your opening removals ripple upward — each pair taken off the bottom can unlock one or two cards above it, and a well-chosen sequence keeps that cascade running.
The 24 cards left over from the deal form the stock. You flip them one at a time onto a waste pile and may pair the top waste card with any exposed pyramid card. When the stock empties, difficulty decides your lifeline: Easy lets you recycle the waste back into the stock twice, Medium once, and Hard not at all — a zero-redeal game where all 24 flips have to count.
The deck's structure explains most stuck boards. There are only four copies of each rank, so every 4 you pair with a 9 consumes one of just four 9s in existence; if the last 9 ends up buried beneath a 4 that needs it, that branch of the pyramid is dead. Counting even loosely — "three of the 9s are gone" — is the single strongest upgrade you can make to your game.
Pyramid is one of the stingiest solitaires ever devised: roughly 1 deal in 30 can be cleared even with perfect play. That scarcity is the appeal. With free instant deals, full undo, and win statistics saved in your browser, every session is a fresh shot at a genuinely rare victory.
Target sum
13
A+Q, 2+J, 3+10, 4+9, 5+8, and 6+7 are the only pairs in the game — Kings score 13 alone and leave solo.
Redeal allowance
2 / 1 / 0
Easy recycles the 24-card stock twice, Medium once, and Hard never — the difficulty setting is your safety net.
Perfect-play odds
~1 in 30
Only about 3% of deals can be cleared even with flawless decisions, so a solved pyramid is a real trophy.
Fluent players never add — they recognize. Drill the combinations until a 5 on the board makes your eye hunt for 8s automatically; our Pair Chart page breaks down every rank with counting tips.
Since every card above the base is pinned by two cards below it, removals near the bottom generate future options while removals near the top spend them. Favor pairs that unbury covered cards, and watch for the fatal pattern where two cards that must pair with each other sit in the same diagonal, one covering the other.
A redeal is not a reset — the waste flips back into the stock in a known order, so your second pass rewards anyone who watched the first.
Four copies of each rank is the whole census. Before committing a card to a pair, ask what its remaining partners are and where they sit. When all four partners of a still-buried card are gone or trapped beneath it, the deal is dead — recognizing that early saves minutes better spent on a fresh pyramid.
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