Seahaven Towers

Seahaven Towers is a patience or solitaire card game that uses a deck of 52 playing cards, and is closely related to the popular solitaire game FreeCell.

Seahaven Towers

A Patience game
Alternative names	Sea Towers, Tours du Alice
Family	FreeCell
Deck	Single 52-card
See also Glossary of solitaire

Rules

Game play is very similar to FreeCell, except that the tableau is built down in suit, and only a king or a sequence starting with a king may be placed on empty tableau spots (although they can simplify the rule and put any card or sequence in an empty tableau spot). There are ten tableau columns instead of eight. In the initial deal five cards are dealt face-up to each column, leaving two cards in hand dealt to the two FreeCells (usually the center but can be in any pattern).

Restrictions

The suit restriction makes the game more difficult than FreeCell. This is counterbalanced by there being more columns of fewer cards.

History

A Macintosh version of Seahaven Towers was created and released in 1988 by Art Cabral as a shareware application.[1][2] This helped popularize the game under that name, but Art himself insisted that he did not invent its rules.[3]

Computer implementations

Art Cabral's original Apple Macintosh version was released in 1988 and re-released for Mac OS X in 2002 and Windows in 2003.[1]

A Seahaven Towers card game was provided with the Silicon Graphics, Inc. IRIX operating system. This implementation included an automated solver that could determine whether a particular game could be solved.

References

1. Longwood Wizard's Guild, archived from August 2016.
2. Game Rules for Seahaven Towers, Solitaire Paradise.
3. Rules for The Towers, SemiColon Software, 2004.