About Kings in the Corner
A cross on the table and four spots you cannot use
Four piles are laid out as a cross and four corner spaces sit empty around them, reserved for kings and nothing else. Seven cards each out of an ordinary deck, no jokers, and the rest becomes the stock. A turn is one draw followed by as many legal plays as you can find: descending, alternating colours, exactly like solitaire, with the extra freedom to pick up an entire pile and drop it onto another. First hand emptied wins. The corners are the whole tension — they are the fastest way to unload a long sequence, and you cannot touch them until a king turns up.
The game people are looking for by three different names
Kings in the Corner, Kings Corner, Kings Corners — it is the same game, and the reason this site exists is that a lot of people remember playing it with a grandparent and cannot find it anywhere. It has never had a boxed commercial version to keep the name fixed, so it survives entirely by being taught. That is a good reason for a free browser version with the rules written out properly next to it. Three skill levels change how well the opponent holds cards back and times its pile moves; the deal is always an honest shuffle.
Rules, tactics, and the house-rule question
The rules page sets out the layout and what counts as a legal move, including the pile transfers that newcomers usually miss for their first few games. The strategy guide covers holding a king back until a corner is worth opening. The variations page collects the house rules families swear by — scoring the cards left in hand, dealing differently for larger groups, and whether the stock may be reshuffled.
Who makes and maintains it
kingsinthecorner.io is made by Card Games Studio, a small independent studio that builds free browser card and tile games — around two dozen of them, including everything suggested at the foot of this page. That shared ownership is the reason those links are there, and the studio page names every domain so nobody has to guess. This particular game gets more “I finally found it” mail than anything else we publish, usually from someone who has been describing a cross of cards to search engines for years. If your family played it with a rule missing here, send it to hello@coffeebreak.gg and it may make the variations page.