Flower Garden Solitaire: every card on show, and a bouquet you can pick from freely

Flower Garden is one of the prettiest ideas in solitaire. Six "flower beds" of six cards each sit across the table, and the remaining sixteen cards form a "bouquet" at the bottom. Every card is face up from the start, and you can take any card from the bouquet whenever you like. Nothing is hidden and nothing is left to luck except the shuffle itself.

That makes it a thinking game rather than a guessing game. And it's a harder one than it looks. We asked a solver to play 2,000 deals under this site's rules. It found a win in 43.3% of them, proved 5.4% impossible, and ran out of search time on the rest. The honest answer, then, is that somewhere between about 43% and 95% of deals can be won. We'll explain what that wide range means for you below.

What our Flower Garden test found

What that range means for a casual player

Flower Garden positions branch out quickly: with sixteen bouquet cards to choose from and six beds to build on, there are a lot of possible games to search. Our solver stopped after 200,000 positions per deal, and in about half the deals that wasn't enough to either find a win or rule one out. So:

• At least 43.3% of deals are certainly winnable; the solver found the winning line.
• At most 94.7% can be won, because 5.4% were proven hopeless.
• The truth is somewhere in between, and we can't yet say where.

What we can say to a relaxed player: this is a game where planning matters a lot, and some deals simply can't be won. If you've tried a deal a few times with Undo and got nowhere, dealing a fresh one is a reasonable choice.

How Flower Garden works on this site

• One deck. Six beds of six cards each, all face up, plus a 16-card bouquet, also face up.
• The bouquet: you can play any of its cards at any time, onto a bed or a foundation.
• Building in the beds: down one rank, in any suit. A 6 of any suit can go on any 7.
• One card at a time: you move only the bottom card of a bed, never a whole run.
• Empty beds accept any card.
• No stock and no redeals: the bouquet is your only reserve.
• Foundations build up by suit from Ace to King.

Habits that help

Use the bouquet as your toolbox, not a dumping ground

Because you can take any bouquet card at any moment, it's best to leave cards there until they're needed. The bouquet is the only place a card can wait without blocking anything.

Find the Aces first

On average about 1.26 of the four Aces start in the bouquet, where you can play them at once. The others are somewhere in the beds. Work out how many cards sit on top of each one before you start.

Don't worry too much about where the Aces start

We checked whether deals with two or more Aces in the bouquet are easier. The difference was small: the solver won 44.2% of those deals and 42.8% of deals with one or no Aces there. The layout of the beds matters more.

Clear one flower bed as soon as you can

Because you can only move one card at a time, an empty bed is your only way to rearrange a column. Getting one clear early makes the whole game easier.

Think in chains

Any-suit building means long chains like 9-8-7-6 form easily. But since chains can't move as a group, a long chain sitting on top of a low card you need is a real problem. Build chains where they won't bury anything.

Common mistakes

• Pulling cards from the bouquet just because they fit, and losing the flexibility they gave you.
• Building a long chain on top of an Ace or 2.
• Filling an empty bed with a card that doesn't lead anywhere.
• Playing the same deal over and over: some deals truly can't be won.

How a typical game unfolds

Most Flower Garden games start with a quiet look at the whole table. Because nothing is hidden, the first minute is best spent finding the Aces and 2s and noting what sits on top of them. Then you start moving single cards, using the bouquet to fill gaps, until one bed is empty. That empty bed is the turning point: with it, you can rearrange a column one card at a time and free the low cards you need. If you run out of useful moves with most of the bouquet still full, it's worth trying Undo to go back and empty a different bed first.

Features you can use

Flower Garden is free to play here, with no download and no account. You get large cards with zoom, Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart, Auto Play and drag-and-drop or tap-to-move. Wins, time and moves are tracked, and you can switch off the sound, play fullscreen or pick a table color. It works in any modern browser on computer, tablet or phone.

The research behind these numbers, step by step

The play-solitaire-free-online.us team at Solitairen OOD ran this study in September 2026.

1. Rules from our game code. This site's Flower Garden code sets six beds of six and a 16-card bouquet, all face up. Any bouquet card can be taken, beds build down in any suit one card at a time, any card fills an empty bed, and there's no stock.
2. Rebuilding the game. We wrote Flower Garden as a program a solver could search.
3. Numbered deals. 2,000 deals, each built from its own numbered seed, so rerunning the test reproduces every card.
4. The player. Every card is visible in Flower Garden, so a solver that sees everything is playing the same game you are. It always looks at the most promising position next and makes only safe automatic moves to the foundations.
5. Running it. Up to 200,000 positions per deal: 866 deals solved, 107 proven impossible, and 1,027 undecided.
6. Published comparison. The largest published study, Blake & Gent (2026), doesn't include Flower Garden, and we don't know of another reliable figure. Ours is, as far as we know, new.
7. Margin of error. The solved share of 43.3% has a 95% range of 41.1% to 45.5%.
8. Limits. With half the deals undecided, we can only give a range for how many are winnable. A bigger search budget would narrow it; we'd like to run one.

The code behind the test

The solver is in flowergarden.py, written in Python 3.11 with the standard library only. It's a best-first search that scores each position by the cards not yet home and the cards resting on a lower card, and keeps a table of positions already seen. Safe automatic foundation moves are made only when no card could still need the one being moved. A shared runner spread the 2,000 deals across 19 worker processes on a 20-core machine, and the run took about 24 minutes. Our 95% ranges use the Wilson score method.

Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, helped us write and check the solver and shape this page. The AI didn't produce any of the figures: every number comes from running the solver.

By Admin, play-solitaire-free-online.us (Solitairen OOD). Research dated September 19, 2026.

Questions new players ask

Can I take any card from the bouquet?

Yes, any of them, at any time.

Can I move a whole run of cards?

No. In Flower Garden you move one card at a time, which is why empty beds are so valuable.

What share of Flower Garden deals are actually winnable?

At least 43.3% of our deals, and no more than 94.7%. We couldn't settle the rest.

Does the suit matter when building?

Not in the beds: any 6 goes on any 7. Suits only matter on the foundations.

What's a good game to try after Flower Garden?

Baker's Solitaire and Eight Off are also all face-up games with a lot of planning.