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. Play Solitaire free in your browser — no download, no account.
How You WinMove all fifty-two cards onto the four foundations, each built up in a single suit from ace to king. Everything else — the alternating-colour stacking, the stock, the digging for face-down cards — exists only to get them there.
- Layout
- 7 tableau piles · 28 cards dealt · 24 in stock
- Draw and scoring
- Turn one or three · standard or Vegas · two independent settings
- Deals
- Standard scoring: verified solvable · Vegas: no guarantee
Solitaire Setup: Tableau, Stock, Waste and Foundations
- Tableau: seven columns holding twenty-eight cards — one card in the first column, two in the second, and so on to seven in the last. Only the bottom card of each column starts face up.
- Stock: the twenty-four cards left over after the deal, face down in the top-left corner. Click it to turn cards into the waste.
- Waste (or talon): where turned stock cards land face up. Only the top card of the waste is playable.
- Foundations: four empty piles in the top-right corner, one per suit. Each is built up from ace to king, and filling all four wins the deal.
Complete Rules
- The deal builds seven piles holding one to seven cards. Only the last card of each pile starts face up; the remaining twenty-four cards form the stock.
- Tableau piles build downward in alternating colours — a red six goes on a black seven. Any face-up run already in that order moves as a single unit.
- An empty column accepts a king and nothing else. This is the restriction that shapes the whole game: emptying a column is worth little until you have a king ready to fill it.
- Foundations build upward in one suit from ace to king. A card already on a foundation may be pulled back into the tableau, which occasionally matters in the endgame.
- Turning the stock reveals one card or three, depending on the setting. Only the top card of the waste can be played, so a turn-three pass exposes every third card unless earlier plays shift the grouping.
- Under standard scoring the stock recycles as often as you like. Under Vegas it turns over exactly once, and when it empties the deal is finished.
- Vegas scoring stakes $52 on the deal and pays $5 for every card that reaches a foundation. Eleven cards break even; clearing the deal pays $260.
- The deal is won when all four foundations reach the king, and lost when no legal move remains and the stock can no longer produce one.
Solitaire Variants: Turn 1, Turn 3 and Vegas
- Turn 1 flips a single card from the stock at a time, so every card in the stock is eventually reachable. It is the most forgiving version and the one most people mean by Solitaire.
- Turn 3 flips three cards at once and only the top one is playable. That cuts the stock into fixed groups of three, so whether a card is reachable depends on when you cycle — a different problem rather than a harder setting.
- Vegas stakes $52 on the deal and pays $5 for every card that reaches a foundation, so eleven cards break even and a full clear pays $260. The stock turns over exactly once, which is why most Vegas deals cannot be cleared at all.
- Draw count and scoring are one three-way choice here rather than four separate games. Picking Vegas keeps the draw count you were already on, so Vegas turn one and Vegas turn three are both reachable.
Your First Game
- Send every ace and two up immediately. Beyond those two ranks, moving a card to a foundation is a real decision — the five you banked may be the card a black six needed.
- Prefer a move that turns a face-down card over one that only tidies the face-up cards. Hidden cards are the only genuine unknown, and each one you expose widens every later choice.
- Before taking a card from the waste, check whether the tableau can supply the same rank and colour. Tableau cards stay available; waste cards can cycle out of reach.
- Do not empty a column until a king is in hand or clearly reachable. In turn-three play an unusable empty column can stay dead for an entire pass through the stock.
- Use undo freely. Nothing here penalises it, and stepping a line back is the fastest way to see which move actually blocked you.
Practical Strategy
- Work the long columns first. The seventh pile hides six cards, and a plan that leaves it untouched runs out of usable material long before the foundations fill.
- Hold a card the foundations want when the tableau still needs it as a landing spot — but only while a real alternative exists. Deferring indefinitely is the classic way to lose a winnable deal.
- In turn-three play, count the cycle. If a card you need sits second in its group of three, playing one earlier waste card re-groups the whole stock and can bring it to the top next pass.
- When a red and a black card can both make the same move, take the one whose colour you are shorter of. Alternating chains stall the moment one colour runs out at a rank.
- A king in an empty column is both an asset and a wall: everything stacked under it is buried until the column comes apart again. Decide what that column is for before committing it.
Winning and Special Rules
- Draw count and scoring are one three-way choice rather than four separate games, because that is how players think of Klondike. Picking Vegas keeps the draw count you were on, so Vegas turn one and Vegas turn three are both reachable.
- Turn one and turn three each have their own verified deal library. The same deal number is a different problem under each rule, so a library built for one is never reused for the other.
- Vegas deals carry no solvability promise, deliberately. It allows a single pass through the stock, and its very low win rate is the format itself rather than a defect to be smoothed away.
- Standard-scoring deals come either from a library built offline at ten million search nodes per deal, or from the solver running in your browser before the deal appears. The table shows which kind you received.
- Verified deals can be switched off. Some players want the real distribution, unwinnable deals included, and the deal badge always says whether the current game was verified.
Common Mistakes
- Emptying a column with no king available. It looks like progress and is one of the most common moves that quietly ends a deal.
- Racing every low card to the foundations. Twos through fives are the connectors that let runs move; banking them early strands the middle ranks in the tableau.
- Treating the waste as a queue that must be cleared. Turning the stock costs nothing under standard scoring, but taking a card you do not need costs you the card.
- Assuming a foundation card is gone for good. Pulling one back into the tableau is legal here, and sometimes it is the only way to finish.
- Reading turn three as turn one but slower. It changes which cards are reachable at all, which is why its verified solvable rate is several points lower.
How Difficult Is Klondike Solitaire?
Two numbers get confused constantly. The share of deals that can be won by a player who can see every card — so-called thoughtful solitaire — is roughly 90% at turn one and about 82% at turn three. The share that real players actually win is far lower. One large public sample reports 33.0% at turn one across 2.9 million games and 11.1% at turn three. Both kinds of number are correct; they measure different things.
Our own solver proves 81% of turn-one deals and 74% of turn-three deals winnable across the full 32,768-deal span of each library. Those are lower bounds rather than the true rate. Klondike is the one game on this site whose state space we cannot exhaust, so a deal the solver fails to crack is not thereby proved unwinnable.
The distance between roughly 90% and roughly 11% is where the game actually lives. Almost every deal you lose was winnable, and it was usually lost in the first dozen moves — a column emptied with no king to fill it, or a low card banked while the tableau still needed it.
Vegas is not the same game made harder; it is a different game. One pass through the stock means most deals cannot be cleared at all, and a public sample of over a million games reports a win rate near 3%. Playing Vegas well means maximising the money on a deal you will usually not finish.
Solitaire FAQ
Is Klondike the same thing as Solitaire?
In everyday English, yes. Klondike is the specific game nearly everyone pictures when they say Solitaire, and Patience is the older British name for the wider family it belongs to.
Is every game of Solitaire winnable?
No. Under turn-one rules roughly nine deals in ten can be won by a player who can see every card; the rest genuinely cannot be won by anyone. On this table, standard-scoring deals are checked by a solver first, so the ones you are given can be won — that is our doing, not a property of the game.
What is the difference between turn one and turn three?
Turn one reveals the stock a card at a time, so every card in it is eventually reachable. Turn three reveals them in fixed groups of three and only the top of each group is playable, so whether a card can be reached depends on when you cycle. It is a different problem, not a harder setting.
What is Vegas scoring?
You stake $52 on the deal and earn $5 for every card that reaches a foundation, so eleven cards break even and a full clear pays $260. The stock turns over exactly once, which is why most Vegas deals cannot be cleared at all.
What is the history of Solitaire?
Patience games appear in European collections from the late eighteenth century, and English writers still call the whole family Patience — a name that describes what the game asks of you. This particular layout picked up the name Klondike from the 1896–99 Gold Rush in the Yukon, and it became the game most of the world knows after Microsoft shipped it with Windows 3.0 in 1990.
Why can only a king go into an empty column?
Because the tableau builds downward, a column has to start from the highest rank or it can never be extended. That one restriction is the main reason Klondike is hard: an empty column with no king waiting is a slot you cannot use.