Strategy guide · Fan family
La Belle Lucie
"The beautiful Lucie" — a nineteenth-century classic dealt entirely in little fans of three. Everything is visible, every move is a commitment, and beauty turns out to have teeth.
The deal
The whole deck is dealt face up into eighteen fans: seventeen fans of three cards and one lone card as the eighteenth. Foundations start empty.
Seventeen fans of three, plus one — 52 cards face up
The rules
- Goal: build the four foundations up in suit from Ace to King.
- Fan building: down in suit, one card at a time. Only the top card of each fan is available.
- Empty fans cannot be filled. Once a fan is gone, the layout permanently shrinks.
- Redeals: twice per game, you may gather every card not on a foundation, shuffle, and redeal into fresh fans of three (with a smaller fan for any remainder). That gives you three deals in total.
Six ways to win more often
- Read every fan before your first move. The entire deck is visible, so the win or loss is largely decided by move order. A fan that reads King-over-Queen-over-Jack of one suit is a locked vault; a fan with an Ace on top is free money. Take stock before you spend anything.
- Never bury what you'll need next. The classic blunder is stacking a card onto the very card beneath it in foundation order — drop the 7♣ onto the 8♣ and that 8 can't reach the foundation until the 7 leaves. Down-in-suit building means every tableau move buries a future need. Move cards only with an exit plan.
- Kings are terrain, not tools. Nothing plays onto a King except its own Queen, and a King on top of a fan traps everything beneath. Fans headed by Kings should be excavated first — or written off in this deal and remembered for the shuffle.
- Spend your deals at different speeds. Play the first deal greedily for foundation cards, since a shuffle is coming anyway. Play the final deal conservatively — there is no reset, so sequence every move before committing.
- Shrink the layout deliberately. Emptying fans feels productive, but fewer fans after a redeal means taller fans and deeper burials. Late in the game, an untouched three-card fan is sometimes worth more than a cleared one.
- Watch the fan bottoms after every shuffle. The bottom card of a three-card fan is effectively frozen until both cards above it find homes. After a redeal, scan the bottoms first: a needed low card on the bottom of a fan tells you exactly where your next two moves have to go — and a King sitting there is a gift, since it was never going anywhere anyway.
Why play it in Full Deck Solitaire
La Belle Lucie rewards exactly the tools Full Deck Solitaire provides: per-game statistics that show your win rate improving as your move order sharpens, and a three-level hint system that can rescue a stalled deal without simply solving it for you. It sits alongside its cousins Trefoil and The Fan in the game list, so once Lucie has you charmed, the whole fan family is a tap away.