Solitaire and Patience Card Games: Klondike, Spider, FreeCell, Yukon, Pyramid and TriPeaks
None of these games has an opponent, so the result depends entirely on how the deck fell and how you take it apart. They differ in three places: how much is visible from the start, whether a mistake can be repaired, and whether the deal can be won at all.
The shared spine: one deck, one clearing condition
Every solitaire deal is a fixed problem. The moment the cards land, the answer is already written into the order of the deck. Having no opponent means nobody profits from your mistakes, and it also means nobody can rescue a dead position for you: all the luck sits in the shuffle, and everything after it is your own decision.
The clearing conditions differ. Klondike, Spider and Yukon reorganise cards into a required order; FreeCell asks you to send all fifty-two cards to the foundations through four narrow cells; Pyramid and TriPeaks remove the tableau card by card. Difficulty does not track the number of cards — it tracks how much information is face up when you start.
Klondike: turning one card or three is a different game
Klondike deals seven piles and a stock. Face-up cards stack in descending order with alternating colours, face-down cards are exposed by clearing what covers them, and each suit builds from ace to king. It is the most played card game in the world and the reason most people hear "Solitaire" and picture this layout.
The draw count is not a difficulty slider; it changes the problem. Turning one card means every card in the stock is eventually reachable. Turning three cuts the stock into fixed groups of three, so whether a given card is reachable depends on when you cycle. Vegas scoring is a third problem again: you stake $52, earn $5 a card, and the stock turns over exactly once — a measured win rate under 3%, and that low rate is the point of the format.
Spider: the suit count is the difficulty dial
Spider spreads two decks across ten columns and asks for eight king-to-ace runs in a single suit, each lifted off the table once complete. Cards stack regardless of suit, but only a suited run moves as one unit — and that gap is where the whole game lives.
One-suit Spider is winnable by almost anyone; four-suit Spider is among the hardest games on this site. The same ruleset spans that range purely through the suit count. The stock deals ten cards at once and refuses to deal while any column is empty, so deciding when to take the next row is a commitment you make many moves in advance.
FreeCell: everything is face up, so it is a puzzle rather than a gamble
FreeCell opens with all fifty-two cards visible and gives you four cells that hold one card each. With no hidden information, whether the deal can be won is settled by the shuffle — and, in principle, you can work it out before touching a card.
It is also the most winnable game in this group: of Microsoft's classic 32,000 numbered deals, only number 11,982 has been proven unsolvable. Losing a FreeCell game is therefore almost always about your line of play rather than your luck, which is exactly why it has spent decades being treated as the thinking player's solitaire.
Yukon: move whole stacks, with no stock to fall back on
Yukon looks like Klondike and plays nothing like it. Any face-up card can be moved together with every card piled on top of it, however disordered that pile is. That single rule removes the step that consumes most of the moves in Klondike — digging out from under a bad stack.
The price is that there is no stock. All fifty-two cards are on the table from the first move, so a dead end is genuinely dead. Russian Yukon requires same-suit stacking instead of alternating colours, and Alaska allows a suited pile to run both up and down. The three settings differ sharply in difficulty while keeping the move-any-stack rule that defines the family.
Pyramid: pair to thirteen, and the pass count decides everything
Pyramid stacks twenty-eight cards into seven rows and asks you to remove pairs adding up to thirteen — ace counts one, jack eleven, queen twelve — while a king is worth thirteen alone and leaves by itself. Only uncovered cards can move, so the order in which you take the pyramid apart matters more than the pairing itself.
What really sets the difficulty is how many times you may cycle the stock. A single pass is brutally hard; three passes is far more forgiving. Implementations disagree about this more than any other rule, which is the main reason the same deal number behaves differently across sites, so we made the pass count a setting you control.
TriPeaks: the length of the chain is the score
TriPeaks arranges twenty-eight cards into three overlapping peaks. Starting from the top of the waste pile, you remove cards one rank above or below it, one after another. It is the fastest game of the six — a deal often finishes in a few minutes.
Its appeal is not whether you win but how long a chain you can run, since every extra card raises the value of the streak. That regularly means passing over the obvious card to keep a longer chain alive. Whether an ace connects to a king — whether ranks wrap around — is the main point of disagreement between implementations, so it is a setting here too.
The difference that matters most: can this deal be won at all
The most annoying thing in solitaire is spending twenty minutes on a game that was unwinnable from the shuffle. For four of these — Klondike under standard scoring, FreeCell, Pyramid and TriPeaks — every deal we hand you has been verified solvable by a solver, so a loss is about your moves.
The other two, and Vegas scoring, carry no such promise, and that is deliberate: proving Spider and Yukon deals is far too expensive, and Vegas allows a single pass through the stock, where the low win rate is the format rather than a flaw. The interface says which kind of deal you are playing instead of leaving it vague.
The 6 games in this family
Solitaire
The Americas · Early modern · Cards
Solitaire, also known as Klondike or Patience, deals seven piles face down and asks you to build all four suits from ace up to king.
Spider Solitaire
The Americas · Early modern · Cards
Spider Solitaire clears ten columns by assembling a king-to-ace run in one suit, then lifting the whole run off the table.
FreeCell
The Americas · Contemporary · Cards
FreeCell deals every card face up and gives you four open cells, so a hand is a puzzle you can reason out rather than a gamble.
TriPeaks Solitaire
The Americas · Contemporary · Cards
TriPeaks Solitaire clears three overlapping peaks one rank at a time, chaining long runs up and down from a single waste pile.
Pyramid Solitaire
Europe · Early modern · Cards
Pyramid Solitaire dismantles a 28-card pyramid by removing pairs that add up to thirteen, while kings leave on their own.
Yukon Solitaire
The Americas · Early modern · Cards
Yukon Solitaire lets you move any face-up card together with everything stacked on top of it, and there is no stock to fall back on.