Sea Towers
Screen shot of the game Sea Towers from Pretty Good Solitaire.
Sea Towers, also known as Seahaven Towers, is an excellent variation of the popular FreeCell solitaire game.
Sea Towers begins by dealing out all the cards into 10 tableau piles (two more piles than FreeCell). Each pile is dealt 5 cards. All the cards are face up. There are 2 remaining cards, which are placed one each in two cells, with 2 more cells that begin the game empty.
The object of Sea Towers is to build 4 foundation piles up in suit from Aces to Kings. The 4 cells are storage places for one card each. Any available card can be moved to an empty cell, and cards in the cells can be moved either back to the tableau or to the foundations.
In the 10 tableau piles, building is down by suit. Only a King can be played to an empty tableau pile. Groups of cards in sequence down by suit cannot be moved together, unless there are enough empty cells that the cards could be moved individually. If you have 2 cells empty, for example, it would be possible to move a group of 3 cards in sequence down by suit by moving the first 2 cards to the cells, then moving the 3th card, then moving the 2 cards back from the cells to reform the group. Since this is a lot of work, you can shortcut by just moving the 3 cards together as a group from one tableau pile to another, as in FreeCell. But if you only have 2 cells empty, you cannot move more than 3 cards together.
Like FreeCell, it is very important to try to keep the cells as empty as possible so that you can move more cards around in the tableau. The restriction of playing only Kings to an empty pile combined with building by suit instead of alternate color makes Sea Towers a somewhat more difficult game than FreeCell.
The overwhelming majority of Sea Towers positions can be won, there are very few unwinnable positions. However, there are a lot more unwinnable positions than in FreeCell.
Sea Towers is one of the 740 games in Pretty Good Solitaire, one of the 101 games in Goodsol Solitaire 101, one of the 16 games in FreeCell Wizard and one of the 30 games in Most Popular Solitaire.
