Flower Garden Solitaire: a game decided by planning, not luck
Flower Garden hides nothing. All 52 cards are face up: 36 of them in six "beds" of six, and the other 16 in the "bouquet", a spread you can play from in any order, whenever you like. There is no stock and no redeal. Once the cards are dealt, every win or loss comes down to the order of your moves.
That makes it the purest planning test on this site. We gave a solver 2,000 deals, every card visible, and up to 200,000 positions to search per deal. It found a winning plan in 43.3% (95% range 41.1–45.5%), proved 5.35% impossible (4.45–6.43%), and in 51.35% (49.2–53.5%) ran out of search before reaching a verdict. So at least 43.3% and at most 94.7% of deals can be won, and only about one deal in twenty is lost before you start.
We have to be clear about what we did not measure: for Flower Garden we ran no greedy program, so we cannot give a greedy-vs-planned gap here. What the figures do show is that the deal itself rarely beats you; what can change the outcome is how well you plan.
At a glance: how much is in the player's hands
| Measure (2,000 deals) | Result | 95% range |
|---|---|---|
| Solver found a win | 43.3% | 41.1–45.5% |
| Proven impossible | 5.35% | 4.45–6.43% |
| Undecided within the search limit | 51.35% | 49.2–53.5% |
| Aces starting in the bouquet (of 4) | 1.26 | 1.23–1.30 |
| Solved with 2+ bouquet Aces (747 deals) | 44.2% | 40.7–47.8% |
| Solved with 0–1 bouquet Aces (1,253 deals) | 42.8% | 40.1–45.5% |
The last two rows are the strategy story. A lucky start with extra free Aces changed the solver's success by under two points, and the ranges overlap. The opening cards barely decide a Flower Garden game; the plan in the middle game does.
Why it is so hard to search
Every bouquet card is always playable, and every card in the beds moves one at a time onto any card one rank higher. That creates a huge number of possible move orders. FreeCell, another all-visible game, gave our solver almost no trouble (99.68% of 10,000 deals solved). Flower Garden left it undecided on more than half. For a human, that depth is the point: there is nearly always a better plan to look for.
Flower Garden rules on spidersolitaireonline.us
- Deck: one 52-card deck, all face up.
- Beds: six columns of six cards.
- Bouquet: the remaining 16 cards. Any of them may be played at any time, to a bed or a foundation.
- Foundations: four, one per suit, Ace to King.
- Building in the beds: down by one rank, any suit.
- Moving: one card at a time; runs do not move as a group.
- Empty beds: any card may fill them.
- No stock, no redeal.
The Spider link
Flower Garden builds the same way Spider does: any card on any card one rank higher, suit ignored. The difference is that Spider lets same-suit runs move as a block, while Flower Garden moves everything singly. Spider players already know how to plan builds; here they have to plan every card's journey separately.
Planning habits that pay in the garden
- Leave the bouquet alone until a card has a job. A bouquet card can never be blocked. Once you put it in a bed, it can block something else.
- Find the buried low cards first. The beds are where Aces and 2s get stuck. Plan backward from them.
- Empty a bed, then keep it working. Any card can fill a space, so an empty bed is your most flexible tool. Use it to reorder and clear it again.
- Only build runs you can unwind. Since cards move singly, a mixed-suit run is useful only if it can go up the foundations in order.
- Don't judge the deal by its Aces. Our split showed almost no difference. Judge it by how deep the low cards are in the beds.
- Use Undo as a planning notebook. With every card visible, trying a line and rewinding is the quickest way to find the plan.
Playing Flower Garden here
Flower Garden is free in a browser on computer, tablet or phone, with no account or download. Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play are included, and zoom or fullscreen help with a busy table. Drag or tap to move; wins, time and moves are counted; sound and table color can be changed.
How we measured it
The spidersolitaireonline.us team ran this study in September 2026 on this site's Flower Garden rules.
- Read the rules from our game code: six beds of six, a 16-card bouquet that is always available, building down in any suit, single-card moves, any card into an empty bed, no stock.
- Rebuilt the game in Python allowing exactly those moves.
- Dealt deals 1 to 2,000 from fixed seeds.
- Used a best-first solver. With every card visible, a solver's verdict applies to a human too. Each deal got up to 200,000 positions.
- Sorted every deal into won, proven impossible or undecided, and counted Aces in the bouquet.
- Looked for published figures. Blake and Gent (2026) do not cover Flower Garden, so there is no outside check.
- Computed 95% ranges with the Wilson score method for proportions and a normal interval for the Ace average.
The solver is Python 3.11, standard library only. It sends a card home automatically only when that can never hurt (an Ace or 2, or when every foundation has reached the rank just below). We wrote and reviewed the code and drafted this page with help from Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic. Every figure comes from running the code, and the team checked them before publishing.
Flower Garden strategy questions
Is Flower Garden a game of luck?
Very little. Only 5.35% of deals were proven impossible, and extra starting Aces made under two points of difference.
Why give a range instead of one number?
Because our solver could not settle over half the deals within its limit. The honest answer is 43.3% to 94.7%.
Can I move a run?
No, every card moves on its own.
What should I play next?
FreeCell is the other all-visible classic. Every game is on the games page.
By Admin, spidersolitaireonline.us (Solitairen OOD). Research run September 2026.