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Game play consists of a tableau with four piles of four cards each (one face-up card on top of three face-down cards). A seventeenth card is put in the first of four foundations. Cards with the same suit as this card must be moved to this foundation and the three other foundations must begin with cards of the same rank. All undealt cards make up the stock.

The top cards in each pile in the tableau are the only cards in play and must be moved to the foundations. A card can be moved to a foundation if a card of the same value has already been placed in the foundation before it. Once cards have been placed on the foundation, any face-down cards remaining in the tableau are turned face-up. When placing cards from the tableau is no longer possible, one can use the stock, deal three cards at a time, and use its top card to make possible moves. One can redeal the stock as long as there are possible moves from the stock or from the tableau to the foundations.

Here's an example (foundations only):

 7 8 10 2 4 9 K A
 7 A 8 K 9
 7 8 K

Suppose that from the example above, any heart card can be moved to the top foundation. One can also place 10 into its foundation, but one cannot put 2 yet into its foundation because 2 hasn't turned up yet in its foundation. No club cannot be placed at this time as the 7 hasn't appeared.

The game is won when all cards have been moved to the foundations. But winning any game can rely on where certain cards are placed in the either one of the piles in the tableau or in the stock pile. Because of this, finishing a game of Osmosis is slim if not rare.


Peek is another solitaire card game using a deck of 52 playing cards. It is played exactly as Osmosis except all the cards on this game's tableau are face-up.

(Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmosis_(solitaire))

General rules

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