Scorpion Solitaire: a tough little game where most deals can't be won

Scorpion looks friendly. There's only one deck, seven columns, and a tiny stock of three cards. You can grab any face-up card and drag it, together with everything on top of it, to a new home. That freedom makes it feel easy for the first few moves. Then the columns lock up.

Here's the part most casual players never hear: on this site's rules, most Scorpion deals can't be won at all. We handed 3,000 deals to a solver that could see every card, including the face-down ones and the three stock cards. It proved 67.5% of them impossible. It found a win in only 12.9%, and the rest were unresolved. So even with perfect knowledge, no more than about a third of deals can be won. If you lose most of your Scorpion games, you're in good company.

Scorpion by the numbers

These are ceiling figures. A real player can't see the face-down cards or the stock, so your win rate will be lower than what the solver can reach. We didn't build a casual-player program for Scorpion, so there's no floor figure here.

How Scorpion is played on this site

• One deck. 49 cards go into seven columns of seven. The first four columns each hide three cards face down under their face-up cards; the rest of the layout is face up.
• The stock holds the last three cards. When you click it, one card goes onto each of the first three columns. You can do this once, whenever you choose.
• Building: down one rank in the same suit: the 6 of hearts goes only on the 7 of hearts.
• Moving: you can move any face-up card, and every card on top of it comes along, even if they're not in order.
• Empty columns accept only a King (with whatever sits on it).
• Winning: when a column holds a full King-to-Ace run in one suit, it's cleared automatically. Clear all four suits to win.

What makes two in three Scorpion deals unwinnable

Same-suit building is very strict

Each card has exactly one card it can go on in the tableau. If that card is buried or badly placed, there's often no other way forward.

Kings can block the whole game

Only a King can go into an empty column, and a King sitting on top of cards you need has nowhere else to go. In 65% of our deals at least one King started face down, where you can't even see it. Interestingly, that made only a small difference to the solver: it won 14.0% of deals with two or more hidden Kings and 12.1% of deals with none. The trouble is more general than any one card.

The stock can't rescue you

With only three stock cards, dealt once, there's very little in reserve. Most of the game has to be solved with the cards already on the table.

Habits that give you the best chance

1. Open the face-down cards first. The first four columns hide twelve cards. Until you see them, you're playing blind.
2. Look for the move that frees a face-down card. Because you can move any face-up card with everything above it, you can often lift a big chunk to expose a hidden card.
3. Save the stock for a stuck moment. Those three cards are your only surprise. Use them when you truly need a new option, not at the start.
4. Clear a column only for the right King. Pick a King whose move frees something useful.
5. Don't grieve over lost games. Two out of three deals can't be won at all. Use Undo to test a few lines, and if nothing works, deal again.

How a typical game unfolds

Most Scorpion games are decided early. The first dozen moves decide whether the face-down cards in the first four columns come free, and whether a column empties for a King. If both happen, the rest of the game often falls into place as same-suit runs grow and clear themselves away. If they don't, the table tends to lock up, and even the three stock cards can't help much. That's why Undo is so useful here: go back to the opening and try a different first few moves before you give up on a deal.

Features on this page

Scorpion is free here, with nothing to download and no sign-up. Large, clear cards with zoom, Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart, Auto Play and drag-and-drop or tap-to-move are all available. Wins, time and moves are tracked, and you can mute the sound, play fullscreen or change the 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 Spider engine has a "scorpion" setting: seven columns of seven with three face-down cards in the first four, a three-card stock dealt once to the first three columns at any time, same-suit building, any face-up card movable with everything on it, Kings only in empty columns, and completed suits cleared automatically.
2. Rebuilding the game. We wrote Scorpion as a program alongside Simple Simon, since both use the same engine.
3. Numbered deals. 3,000 deals, each shuffled from a numbered seed so the test can be repeated.
4. The player. A "thoughtful" solver that knows the face-down cards and the three stock cards. It always explores the most promising position first and had up to 200,000 positions per deal. Because it knows things a player can't, its result is a ceiling.
5. Running it. 386 deals won, 2,026 proven impossible, and 588 undecided.
6. Checking the "impossible" verdicts. We re-tested some of them (deals 6 and 8) with a completely separate brute-force program, which agreed they can't be won.
7. Published comparison and margin of error. Blake & Gent (2026) doesn't cover Scorpion, so there's nothing published to compare against. The 95% range for the impossible share is 65.8% to 69.2%.
8. Limits. About a fifth of deals were left undecided, so we give the winnable share as a range: between 12.9% and 32.5%.

The code behind the test

Scorpion is in spiderlike.py, which also covers Simple Simon, written in Python 3.11 using only the standard library. The solver is a best-first search that keeps a set of positions it has already seen and skips pointless moves such as moving an entire column into an empty one. A shared runner spread the deals over 19 worker processes on a 20-core machine, and the run took about 48 minutes. The separate check is verify_scorpion_bruteforce.py. Every 95% range here uses the Wilson score method.

We had Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, help write and review the solver and draft this page. It didn't produce any 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

Why do I lose so much at Scorpion?

Mostly because the deal can't be won. Our solver proved about two in three deals impossible even though it could see every card.

Can I move cards that aren't in order?

Yes. In Scorpion you can move any face-up card, and all the cards on top of it come with it.

What's the best moment to use Scorpion's three stock cards?

Whenever you like, but only once. It's usually best to keep it for when you're stuck.

How close is Scorpion to Spider Solitaire?

They share the idea of building full suits in the columns, but Scorpion uses one deck and lets you move unordered groups. Try Spider to compare.

What's a friendlier game to try next?

Simple Simon uses a similar idea with every card face up, and most of its deals can be won.