Seahaven Towers Solitaire

Seahaven Towers is a FreeCell variant with a beautiful layout and a much lower win rate than its cousin. Art Cabral created it in 1988 as a shareware application for the Macintosh — predating FreeCell's widespread fame and representing a more demanding predecessor to the logic-puzzle solitaire tradition.

All 52 cards spread across ten tableau columns of exactly five cards each. The two leftover cards go into two of the four free cells at the start. This creates denser columns with fewer natural gaps. Where FreeCell gives you eight columns to work across, Seahaven Towers compresses the same deck into ten shorter but more congested piles.

The defining restriction is the empty column rule: only a King or a King-topped sequence may fill an empty tableau column. In FreeCell, clearing a column unlocks movement of any card. In Seahaven Towers, it unlocks only Kings. Clearing a column without a ready King to plant there is often a wasted move — or a trap.

Tableau building follows same-suit descending sequences only. You can only stack a card onto a card of the same suit one rank higher. This limits available moves far more than FreeCell's alternating-color rule.

The win rate sits around 13–14% for average players. Seahaven Towers rewards genuine mastery rather than persistent clicking. Winnable games require careful long-range planning. Unwinnable games tend to look solvable until a critical moment proves otherwise.

1. Deal a standard 52-card deck face-up into ten tableau columns of five cards each (50 cards total). Place the remaining two cards into any two of the four free cells. All cards are visible from the start.
2. Place four foundation piles above the tableau. Foundations build upward from Ace to King by suit.

On each turn you may:

• Move a tableau card. Move the top card of any column to another column only if the receiving column's top card is the same suit and exactly one rank higher. The 7 of Spades may only go on the 8 of Spades. No cross-suit building is allowed.
• Use a free cell. Move any top card to an empty free cell at any time. Cards in free cells may move to the tableau (following the same same-suit rule) or to a foundation.
• Play to a foundation. Move a card to a foundation if it is the correct next card in that suit's sequence.
• Move a sequence. Same-suit sequences already correctly ordered on the tableau may move as a unit. The number of cards in the sequence may not exceed one plus the number of currently empty free cells.
• Fill an empty column. Empty columns may only be filled by a King or a valid same-suit sequence beginning with a King. No other card may enter an empty column.

The game is won when all 52 cards are on the four foundations, built from Ace to King by suit.

• Plan Kings before clearing columns. The Kings-only empty column rule is the central constraint. Before clearing a column, identify which King you will place there. Clearing columns speculatively — hoping a King appears — wastes your most valuable resource.
• Uncover Aces and low cards early. Foundations cannot grow without Aces. Trace each Ace's location before making early moves and plan a route to extract it. Blocked low cards stall the whole game once the tableau fills.
• Treat free cells as loans, not parking. Same-suit building means many cards have nowhere to go for long stretches. Free cells are your pressure valve — every card you park there should have a clear destination within a few moves.
• Count available cells before moving sequences. You start with only two free cells open (two are already occupied at game start). This limits sequence mobility immediately, which is a large part of why Seahaven Towers is harder than FreeCell despite the family resemblance.
• Consolidate suits. When multiple moves are available, prefer moves that grow same-suit sequences. Suit consolidation creates future mobility; mixing suits creates gridlock that free cells cannot resolve.

Seahaven Towers was created by Art Cabral in 1988 and distributed as shareware for the Apple Macintosh. It belongs to the early wave of computer-native solitaire games designed for mouse-driven play rather than adapted from physical card decks.

The game predates FreeCell's widespread popularization through Microsoft Windows in the early 1990s. Cabral used same-suit building rather than FreeCell's alternating-color rule, making Seahaven Towers closer in spirit to Baker's Game — the even older FreeCell predecessor also built around suit-based sequencing.

Despite never achieving mainstream recognition, Seahaven Towers has maintained a loyal following among dedicated solitaire enthusiasts. It appears regularly in comprehensive solitaire software collections and is cited in analyses of FreeCell variant difficulty as a benchmark for harder same-suit building games.

The name evokes a romantic, architectural image that contrasts pleasantly with the grim mathematics of its play — a pattern not uncommon in the patience tradition, where elegant names often conceal games of considerable frustration.