Royal Marriage is a
Patience
(or forbearance) is the ability to endure difficult circumstances. Patience may involve perseverance in the face of delay; tolerance of provocation without responding in disrespect/anger; or forbearance when under strain, especially when faced ...
game using a deck of 52
playing card
A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a fi ...
s. It is an eliminator game in the style of the solitaire game
Accordion
Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a reed ...
. The game is so called because the player seems to remove anything that comes between the Queen and the King of the same suit for them to "marry." It also goes under the name Royal Wedding or Matrimony.
["Matrimony" (p.59) in ''The Little Book of Solitaire'', Running Press, 2002. ]
Rules
The Queen of the chosen
suit
A suit, lounge suit, or business suit is a set of clothes comprising a suit jacket and trousers of identical textiles worn with a collared dress shirt, necktie, and dress shoes. A skirt suit is similar, but with a matching skirt instead of tr ...
(traditionally the Queen of Hearts) is placed immediately on the table face-up while her corresponding King is placed face-down. The remaining fifty cards are shuffled and placed on the top of the King to form the stock. Cards are dealt from the stock one at a time to the right of the Queen. If a pair of cards with either the same rank or suit are separated by one or two cards, the in-between cards may be discarded. This may result in new opportunities to discard additional cards.
Strategy revolves around decisions of whether to discard cards or not. It may be advantageous to retain as many cards of the Queen's suit as possible, as these may be easily eliminated by the King or Queen at any tie, but may be helpful in eliminating other cards.
The game is won when the King and Queen are brought together -- that is, when only one or two cards remain in between them, which can then be discarded.
Variations
Royal Marriage is possible to play in-hand, rather than on a surface such as a table. In this case, the deck is held face-down in one hand, with the King being uppermost face-down card and the Queen being held face-up above it. Cards are played from the bottom of the deck onto the Queen, and fanned out to show all cards that could possibly affect play.
Alternatively, the Queen can be played on one end of a surface, and all cards dealt out at the beginning to the Queen's right, ending with the King. This allows for an additional measure of strategy: being able to view the entire sequence of cards allows the player to choose which cards to discard and in what order to ensure a win.
Push-Pin is a variant of Royal Marriage that uses two decks.
See also
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List of solitaire games
*
Glossary of solitaire terms
Games of patience, or (card) solitaires as they are usually called in North America, have their own 'language' of specialised terms such as "building down", "packing", "foundations", "talon" and "tableau". Once learnt they are helpful in des ...
References
Closed non-builders
Single-deck patience card games
Pocket patience card games
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