Today’s Pyramid deal
The same twenty-eight cards in the same pyramid, and the same twenty-four in the stock, for every player. The arrangement comes from today’s date rather than from a server.
Scored on cards cleared, not on winning
This is the important difference from the other card games here, and it is a deliberate answer to a real problem.
Pyramid deals are frequently unwinnable. That is simply the nature of the game — no amount of good play changes it, and it is not a flaw to be engineered away. But scoring a shared daily on whether you finished would mean scoring people on which day they happened to turn up, and on a hard day everyone would record the same nothing.
So the daily counts how many of the twenty-eight pyramid cards you cleared. Everybody has the same deal, so the number compares directly, and even on a board nobody can finish it still shows who played it best. Time breaks ties between equal counts.
Clearing all twenty-eight is a genuine achievement rather than the expected outcome. A result in the low-to-mid twenties is a perfectly good day.
Unlimited passes through the stock
You can cycle the stock as many times as you like. That is not generosity, it is what keeps the game a puzzle: restricted to a single pass, a great many deals become hopeless, and the day’s result would turn on the order the cards happened to fall in.
With the waste coming round again and again, the question becomes which pair to take and when — which is a decision rather than a roll.
What happens if you stop
The deal is finished when there are no pairs left to take, and whatever you had cleared is your result for the day. Undo is unlimited before that, so a line that closes the board off can always be walked back and tried differently.
The streak
Finishing — or simply getting as far as you can — on any one daily keeps your site-wide streak alive. There is a single streak covering every game, so a few minutes on whichever one appeals is enough, and you are never obliged to play them all.
Every past Pyramid deal stays available in the archive, regenerated from its own date whenever you want it.
Wondering which pair to take when two are available? The Pyramid strategy guide covers tracking partners and reading what a removal opens, above unlimited practice deals.