Fourteen

What is Fourteen

Fourteen is a solitaire of space rather than of sequence. You hold three cards from a shuffled deck and a grid of twenty-five empty squares, and every card you put down stays where you put it. There is only one way to take a card off the board again: place a card beside one that, added to it, makes exactly fourteen. Ace counts as one and king as thirteen, so the pairs are ace with king, two with queen, three with jack, four with ten, five with nine, six with eight, and seven with seven.

When that happens both cards explode and the two squares come back. Cards of the same suit placed side by side pay thirty points each without freeing anything, so there is a constant argument between the score and the space. Explode on consecutive turns and the combo multiplies everything. Empty the deck and your hand and you climb a level, take a fresh deck and five hundred points times the level. Fill all twenty-five squares and the game is over — which is the only way it ever ends.

How to play

1. Tap a card in your hand to pick it up, then tap any empty square to place it. The board is five by five and you may place anywhere; there is no rule about where a card must go, only about what it does when it lands.
2. Neighbours are the four squares up, down, left and right — never the diagonals. A neighbour of the same suit pays thirty points. A neighbour whose value plus yours makes exactly fourteen explodes with your card, pays a hundred, and frees both squares.
3. Explosions on consecutive turns build a combo that multiplies the whole turn: two in a row doubles it, three trebles it, and it resets the moment you place a card that explodes nothing.
4. The deck holds fifty-two cards and you draw one after every placement. Empty the deck and the hand together and you level up: five hundred points times the new level, and a whole new deck. The run ends when the grid is full and there is nowhere left to place.

Strategies that work

• Seven is the awkward card, because its only partner is another seven and there are just four in the deck. Put the first seven where it has two or three free neighbours, not against an edge, or the other three will have nowhere to meet it.
• Keep the middle of the board loose. A card in the centre has four neighbours, a card on an edge has three, a card in a corner has two — so corners are where you park the cards you have given up on, and the centre is where you set up explosions.
• The suit bonus is thirty points and the explosion is a hundred, and only one of them gives you a square back. When the board is more than half full, stop chasing suits: space is worth more than points, because points end when the space does.
• Combos multiply the whole turn, so two explosions in a row are worth far more than two explosions with a quiet placement between them. When you can see two, do them back to back — and if the second needs a card you do not have yet, it is often worth spending the first anyway rather than losing the chain.
• Played well the run does not end: you clear the deck, climb a level and get another. That means the leaderboard rewards the long game — the score is the whole run, not one deck, and it is only banked when the grid finally fills.

A little history

Making a fixed number out of a handful of cards is one of the oldest things people do with a deck. Cribbage counts to fifteen and thirty-one, and has since the seventeenth century; the French game of trente-et-un chased thirty-one across Europe; the trick-taking games of Asia often ask for a total rather than a suit. Fourteen borrows that habit and drops it onto a grid, which changes it entirely: the number is easy, the geometry is not. A pair that would be trivial in your hand is impossible on the board if the two cards are three squares apart with a stranger between them. The result is a game about real estate — about which squares are still worth something, and which have quietly become walls.

Frequently asked questions