Samsung Galaxy / Games > Card / LA BELLE LUCIE SOLITAIRE
REVIEW
La Belle Lucie Solitaire picks an obscure variant and plays it straight.
Algot Games skips the Klondike crowd to ship the fan-shaped 17-piles-of-three patience puzzle that desktop solitaire compilations always buried in a submenu. The result is narrow, honest, and slightly under-finished.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
La Belle Lucie Solitaire
ALGOTECH SOFTWARE PRIVATE LIMITED
OUR SCORE
6.9
SAMSUNG GALAXY
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
La Belle Lucie is a solver’s solitaire dressed up as a casual game, and Algot Games has not pretended otherwise. The fan-shaped 17-piles-of-three layout has lived for a century in card-game books and desktop solitaire compendiums, and it tends to attract the same kind of player every time — someone who likes thinking through a deal more than they like watching cards fly. That audience is small but real, and the Galaxy Store has not historically served it well.
What Algot Games has done is treat the variant as the product rather than as one entry in a menu. There is no clutter, no upsell to a premium pack of 200 solitaires, no attempt to retrain the player into Klondike. You open the app, you get La Belle Lucie, you play. For a niche that usually has to settle for being feature number 47 in a bundle, that focus is the whole pitch.
The cost of that focus is visible. There is not much production value here — the table is flat, the cards are stock, the only audio is a card-flip sound effect. A casual player wandering in from a search for “solitaire” will bounce. But for the players who came specifically looking, the app does the thing it advertises, which is more than most of the Galaxy Store card aisle can say.
La Belle Lucie is a solver's solitaire dressed up as a casual game, and Algot Games has not pretended otherwise.
FEATURES
La Belle Lucie deals 51 cards into 17 fans of three and leaves the last card aside as a teaser. You build the four foundations up from Ace to King, moving only the exposed top card of each fan, and you get two redeals when the board stalls. There is no stock pile, no waste pile, no Klondike-style turn-three drip — every card is face-up from the first deal, and the puzzle is entirely about sequencing.
Algot Games has wrapped the rules in the same template that powers their Sultan Solitaire release: a flat green felt, drag-and-tap card movement, a hint button, an undo, and a running statistics screen. Auto-complete kicks in once the foundations are unblocked. The two redeals are surfaced as buttons rather than buried in a menu, which matters because La Belle Lucie is one of the harder solitaires to win and most boards genuinely need them.
Monetisation is interstitials between games plus a banner during play, in line with the Galaxy Store free-game shelf. There is no progression meta-layer — no daily challenge, no levels, no streak. You play a hand, you win or lose, the stats screen updates, you deal again.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The variant choice is the headline. La Belle Lucie is rarely shipped as a standalone app — it usually lives inside a 150-game solitaire compendium where nobody finds it — and Algot Games has bet that a dedicated audience exists for the fan layout. That bet looks correct. If you came up on Microsoft's old Solitaire collection or the BVS pack, this is the version you remember liking and never being able to find again.
The rules implementation is faithful. Two redeals, no peek at the stock, no shortcut moves between fans below the exposed card. The statistics screen tracks win rate honestly rather than padding it with assisted wins, which is the right call for a puzzle this dependent on the opening deal.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The art direction is thin. Card faces are legible but generic, the felt is flat, and there is no theme variation to speak of — no card back picker, no table colour, no animation flourish on a foundation completion. Sultan Solitaire from the same developer has the same problem, and at some point the studio will need to invest in a visual identity that survives a side-by-side against Solitaired or Pretty Good Solitaire Mobile.
The teaching is also light. La Belle Lucie has unusual rules even by solitaire-variant standards, and a player who taps in expecting Klondike will lose three hands before figuring out why nothing moves. A short interactive tutorial — or even a single annotated screenshot — would close that gap. Ad cadence is acceptable but not generous; expect an interstitial roughly every other completed hand.
CONCLUSION
Install this if you already know what La Belle Lucie is and want it on your Galaxy phone without sifting through a 150-game pack. Skip it if you came for casual solitaire generally — Klondike and Spider apps on the same storefront will be more forgiving and better dressed. Algot Games has carved out a small, defensible niche by treating a forgotten variant with respect; the next step is making it look as considered as it plays.