How to play Scorpion Solitaire

Assemble all four suits in order from king down to ace. A finished run flies off the board on its own.

Seven columns of seven cards: the first four columns hide their first three. The last three cards wait face down as a reserve.

Move any face-up card onto the same-suit card one rank higher, and everything stacked on it comes along, in whatever order it sits.
Only kings (with their stacks) may move to an empty column. Nothing builds on an ace.
Tap the reserve to deal its three cards onto the first three columns, once per game, whenever you choose.
Uncovering a face-down card flips it.

Tips

Dig out the face-down cards early: the first four columns hide twelve of them.
Watch for cards trapped above their own destination; those knots decide the game.
Hold the reserve until you genuinely need new cards; it can rescue a stuck position.

Scorpion belongs to the Yukon family of solitaire games, the same family as Russian solitaire elsewhere on this site. Its signature move is what sets the whole family apart: you can pick up any face-up card and drag it, along with everything sitting on top of it, to a new spot, even when that pile on top is a jumble of cards in no particular order. Klondike won't let you do that; a run there has to be in strict order before it's allowed to move as a group. Scorpion doesn't check what's stacked above the card you grab, only what it's allowed to land on.

The short rules above cover what's legal. This is about what that one difference changes: how you build a run, why a move that looks productive can quietly wreck your position, and where the reserve fits into a plan instead of being a panic button.

Move the whole stack, mess and all

In Klondike, a movable group of cards has to already be in order: a red six on a black seven on a red eight, each card legally sitting on the one below it. Scorpion drops that requirement entirely. Grab any face-up card on the tableau and every card on top of it comes with it, sorted or not. A three could be sitting on a jack, sitting on a nine, and you can still move the whole clump in one drag, as long as the bottom card, the one you actually clicked, has a legal home.

That sounds like it makes the game easier, and it does mean you're rarely stuck holding a card with nowhere to go. But it also means a single drag can rearrange a huge chunk of the board at once. Check what you're covering up on the column underneath before you drop a big stack there; you might be burying the card you needed to reach next.

Down in suit, not just down in color

Scorpion tightens the building rule instead of loosening it. You build downward in the same suit: a red six only goes on a red seven of that exact suit, hearts on hearts, not hearts on diamonds. A red six sitting next to a black seven, or even a diamond seven, has nowhere to go. That's a stricter test than Klondike's alternating colors, and it's the main reason columns look tangled for most of the game: cards that are close in rank and color still can't touch unless the suit matches too.

The payoff for that strictness is the win condition. You're not just clearing cards off the board, you're assembling each suit in place, king down to ace, as one long run sitting in a single column. Once a full king-to-ace run comes together, it's finished and out of your way. Everything you do all game is aimed at getting four of those runs built.

Every move buries something

Because you can move messy stacks around, the real game is digging: getting a specific buried card free so it can take a card that needs a home or slot onto a run that needs it. Before you make a move, ask what it uncovers and what it covers up. A drag that clears the card you need but buries a different card you'll need five moves later is a trade, not a free win, so think it through before you take it.

Empty columns and kings are your main tools for breaking up a stuck position, since only a king, with whatever's stacked on it, can move into an empty column. Emptying a column gives you a fresh landing spot and a chance to split apart a pile that's blocking you, but only if you've actually got a king ready to put there. An empty column with no king waiting is a slot you can't use yet.

The reserve is three cards dealt face down at the start, off to the side, and you can deal them onto the first three columns exactly once, whenever you choose. There's no second reserve and no way to undo the timing once you've committed, so save it for a genuine dead end rather than spending it out of habit early on.

How winnable is Scorpion, really

We don't have a number for you here, and we're not going to make one up. Golf and Pyramid on this site get an exact winnability figure because every move in those games only shrinks the board; a card played never comes back, so a search through all the possible lines of play is guaranteed to finish. Scorpion doesn't work that way. Moving a whole messy stack around means the same arrangement of cards can be reconstructed a huge number of different ways, and that blows up the search space far past what we can exhaustively check for a one-off content page.

It plays harder than it looks at first. The same-suit building rule and the buried, out-of-order stacks mean plenty of deals end up stuck well before all 52 cards are sorted, even with careful play. Deals here are seeded and reproducible, so you and a friend can compare notes on the same layout, but they are never filtered for winnability. We'd rather tell you plainly that we don't have a number than publish one we can't back up.