Solitaire (Klondike)

How to play

1. Choose Draw 1 card (easier) or Draw 3 cards (classic and harder) and click New game.
2. Move cards by dragging them with the mouse or your finger, or simply click (tap) a card: it goes to the best legal spot, a foundation first, then a column.
3. Click the stock (the face-down pile at the top left) to turn cards onto the waste. When the stock is empty, click ↻ to turn the waste back over. You can go through the stock as many times as you like.
4. Undo takes back moves one at a time, as far as the start of the game.
5. When every card is face up and the stock is used up, Auto-complete appears and sends all the cards to the foundations for you.

The counters show your Moves and Time. Your Best time and the number of Games won are kept separately for draw 1 and draw 3, in this browser only. The game in progress is saved too, so you can close the tab and come back to it.

The rules of Klondike

A standard 52-card deck is dealt into seven columns: the first has one card, the last seven, and only the top card of each column is face up. The 24 remaining cards form the stock.

• Goal: move all 52 cards to the four foundations, one per suit, from ace up to king.
• Columns: build down in alternating colours: a red 7 goes on a black 8. You can move a card together with all the face-up cards on top of it, as long as the sequence stays valid.
• Empty column: only a king (with the cards stacked on it) can fill an empty column.
• Face-down cards: when you uncover one, it turns face up automatically.
• Foundations: a card on a foundation can come back to a column if that helps.

Keyboard play

Press Tab to move from card to card. Enter sends the focused card to the best spot, like a click. For a precise move, press Space on a card to pick it up, move to the destination column or foundation with Tab, then press Space again to drop it (Escape cancels). Enter or Space on the stock turns cards. Every card has a spoken name, such as “Queen of hearts”, for screen readers.

Strategy tips

• Uncover face-down cards first. Prefer moves that reveal a hidden card, especially in the longer columns on the right.
• Do not rush to empty a column. An empty column is only useful if you have a king ready to put in it.
• Keep low cards moving up. Aces and twos should go to the foundations at once, but think twice before sending 5s or 6s up: you may need them to hold lower cards of the other colour.
• In draw 3, plan the stock. Only every third card is reachable on each pass; playing a card from the waste changes which cards you will see next time.
• Use Undo to explore. Unlimited undo lets you test a line of play and come back if it leads nowhere.

Not every deal can be won. Studies with computer solvers, which see every hidden card, suggest that around 80 % of deals or more can be won with perfect play; a human, who cannot see the face-down cards, wins fewer.

A short history

Patience games were played in Europe from the late 18th century; the word “patience” is still used in British English and in French. Klondike takes its name from the Klondike gold rush in Canada’s Yukon at the end of the 1890s. It became the best-known solitaire in the world after 1990, when a version by Wes Cherry was included with Microsoft Windows 3.0 to teach people how to use a mouse by dragging cards.