How To Play La Belle Lucie
La Belle Lucie is also known as Alexander the Great, Clover Leaves, Lovely Lucy, Midnight Oil, The Fan, Three Shuffles and a Draw, and Trefoil.
A one-deck patience played in little fans — with two redeals to save you.
The idea
The whole deck is spread into small three-card fans. Your job is to build the four foundations up by suit, each from the A to the K, by freeing cards from the fans.
Two variants
- Trefoil (the default) — the four Aces start already on the foundations, and the rest deal into a tidy 16 fans of three. A little friendlier.
- La Belle Lucie (classic) — the Aces are in play, and the deck deals into 17 fans of three plus one single card.
Switch between them in the gear, along with the mercy move and a four-color deck.
Moving cards
- Only the exposed card — the one on the right end of a fan — is available, and it moves one at a time.
- On the foundations, build up in suit: A 2 3 …
- On the fans, build down in suit — a 7♥ goes onto an 8♥.
- Tap a card to send it straight to a foundation, or drag it onto a fan.
The catch: once a fan is emptied, the space stays empty — you can't move a card into it. That's what makes the game bite.
Redeals
Stuck? Press Redeal: every card not yet on a foundation is gathered up, shuffled, and dealt back out into fresh fans of three. You get two redeals per game — spend them wisely.
The mercy move
With the mercy option switched on, once both redeals are gone you get one last lifeline: tap any single buried card to pull it free and play it. You can only do this once.
Buttons
- Hint — points out a move (or suggests a redeal).
- Auto — sweeps every ready card up to the foundations.
- Undo — steps back, redeals included.
- New game — deals a fresh spread.
Odds
The beautiful, unforgiving one. If you like a solitaire that fights back, this is it.
The shape of a deal
One deck is spread into little three-card fans — sixteen of them in the default Trefoil layout, with the four Aces already resting on the foundations. Foundations climb by suit from the Ace; the fans build down by suit; and only the exposed end card of a fan can move, one at a time. When you run dry, you may gather everything and redeal — but only twice.
It is the hardest game here
Every other solitaire in this collection is winnable most of the time. La Belle Lucie is not. Even with careful, planned play, the default game — Trefoil, two redeals, no mercy — comes home only about one time in seven.
That's not a knock on the game — it's the appeal. A win here is earned, and a good run that almost makes it is the norm rather than the exception (a typical game lands about 33 of 52 cards on the foundations).
The redeals are the game
Deal the fans once and play them out with no reshuffle, and you'll win almost never — barely one deal in a hundred. Each redeal is a lifeline, and each one roughly doubles your chances. The whole game is really about setting up the next redeal to land well.
| Redeals allowed | Win rate |
|---|---|
| 0 — the raw deal | ~1% |
| 1 | ~7% |
| 2 (default) | ~15% |
Mercy changes everything
Turn on the optional mercy move — the one-time pull of any buried card once your redeals are gone — and the game opens up dramatically. That single reach into a stuck board is worth as much as another redeal and then some, lifting the win rate to roughly one in four.
| Setting (Trefoil, 2 redeals) | Win rate |
|---|---|
| Mercy off (default) | ~15% |
| Mercy on | ~28% |
The Classic variant — Aces in play, all 52 cards fanned — runs a little harder still, around 11%, since you must dig out the Aces before a suit can even begin.
Why it fights so hard
Three rules combine into a vice:
- Down by suit, not color. A card fits only onto the exact next card of its own suit — a 7♥ goes on the 8♥ and nowhere else. Landing spots are rare.
- One card at a time, exposed only. A card buried under two others is frozen until you can peel the fan — and you often can't.
- Empty fans stay empty. This is the cruel one. In most solitaires an empty space is your most powerful tool; here it's dead ground. You get no free workspace, so a redeal is the only way to rearrange a jam.
Where it's decided: each suit has to be combed into one long descending chain before it can feed the foundation — but the tableau builds down while the foundation wants cards up, so the two pull against each other. Freeing low cards and keeping a suit's run together, in the moves before a redeal, is what separates a 15% player from a 28% one.
How to beat the odds
- Play the board dry before redealing — squeeze every legal move out first; a redeal spent early is a redeal wasted.
- Unbury before you build. A move that frees a trapped card is usually worth more than one that just tidies the top.
- Save mercy for the unlock, not the last card. If you use it, aim it at the one buried card that springs a whole cascade loose.
- Expect to lose — and enjoy it. At one win in seven, the beauty is in the near-misses. This is a game you play for the runs that shouldn't have worked.
Figures come from our own analysis of this game's engine: a solver plays each round to push as many cards to the foundations as it can, then redeals (a fresh shuffle of what's left) and plays again, up to the allowed number of redeals; the mercy figure adds the one-time buried-card pull. Hundreds of deals per setting. These are a floor for skilled play — the numbers climb a little with deeper planning, and a patient human who reads the whole board can beat them.
