How to Play Wading Pool Solitaire

A gentler relative of Wave Motion: all 52 cards start across an 8-pile reserve you can build on one card at a time. Move cards into an 8-pile tableau—where you can shift whole sequences at once—to arrange each suit into one ordered run.

Setup

1. Deal all 52 cards face up across 8 reserve piles (dealing across all 8, then repeating until all cards are dealt).
2. Create 8 empty tableau piles opposite the reserve.
3. Both the reserve and the tableau build the same way: one rank lower, same suit—for example, a 9 of hearts can sit on a 10 of hearts in either area.

How to play

• Move the top card of any reserve or tableau pile onto another pile if it's one rank lower and the same suit, such as a 9 of spades onto a 10 of spades.
• Only single cards can move to or from the reserve—you can't move a whole sequence there.
• On the tableau, you can move an entire same-suit run together, as long as each card is one rank lower than the one below it.
• When you've built a complete tableau sequence (say, K♠ down to A♠), it stays put as a finished run—that pile is done.
• Empty reserve piles can never be refilled, but an empty tableau pile can take any available card.

How to win

Objective: Arrange all 52 cards into eight ordered tableau piles, each running from high to low in the same suit.

You win when every card is arranged into a complete, ordered suit sequence across the tableau piles. You're stuck if the remaining reserve cards cannot fit on any tableau pile.

Tips

• Unlike Wave Motion, you can build directly on the reserve here, so use that to buy time while you free up tableau space.
• Watch the reserve—cards near the bottom of a pile might be blocked for a long time if higher cards don't fit elsewhere.
• Build low cards (like Aces and deuces) into tableau sequences early to create flexibility for the higher cards still stuck in the reserve.

Play Wading Pool free on Windows

CardTray is a free solitaire app for Windows that includes Wading Pool alongside 300+ other games. It saves every move as you play, so you can close the window and pick the game up later, replay any deal, and take on a new Daily Challenge deal every day. Browse every game in the Game Gallery.

Related games

More games from the FreeCell family:

• Antares — Antares blends two classic tableaus into one game: four piles play by FreeCell's alternating-color, single-card rules, and four piles play by Scorpion's same-suit, flexible-group rules, all feeding the same foundations and free cells.
• Baker's — A strategic solitaire in the FreeCell family, with four temporary storage cells and eight tableau piles where you build sequences in descending order by suit only—no alternating colors.
• Chinese FreeCell — A streamlined version of FreeCell using only Hearts, Spades, and Diamonds.