Pyramid

Pyramid Rulebook

Table of Contents

Use a single standard 52-card deck.
Deal 28 cards from the deck face up in the form of a triangle of overlapping rows (the pyramid). The source's diagram of the pyramid layout is not reproduced in this text.
Place the remainder of the deck face down as the stock.

The remainder of the stock is dealt one card at a time, and available cards are discarded in pairs adding to 13.
Kings (13) are discarded alone.
Any available queen (12) may be discarded with any available ace (1), jack (11) with two (2), ten (10) with three (3), and so on.
Stock cards which are not discarded when turned up are placed on the top of a waste pile.
Cards available for discarding are any uncovered cards in the pyramid, the top of the waste, and the stock card most recently dealt.
Discarded cards simply vanish from the game and play no further part.

In the original version of the game, the stock is dealt once. There is no redeal.

The following are described in the source as variants, not as the standard rules.

Morehead and Mott-Smith devised a variant called Par Pyramid, in which the waste may be turned over to form a new stock (without shuffling) and redealt twice more.
Scoring gives points for clearing all the cards of the pyramid: 50 for the first pass, 35 for the second pass, and 20 for the third.
A penalty of 1 point is applied for each card left in the waste after three deals.

A card may be lifted, uncovering a complementary card beneath it, and then both cards may be discarded together. The card underneath must be covered only by the card it is being discarded with.
This is an optional rule. The source notes that it can also be used as an optional rule in other discarding games such as Fourteen Out or Nestor.