Solitaire

🕹️ How to play

1. How to start a game of Klondike solitaire: The page opens on a deal that is already laid out — no start button, no difficulty pop-up, no account. The table has three parts: four empty foundation slots along the top on one side, the stock and waste on the other, and seven tableau columns below, each showing only its bottom card face up. On a first visit one line of guidance sits above the table and one playable move is outlined in jade green, so there is always somewhere to start.
2. How to move cards in solitaire: Tap a face-up card. It lifts, together with any run sitting on it, and every legal landing spot picks up a dashed outline. Tap one of those outlines and the card flies over. To send a card straight to a foundation, tap the already-selected card a second time. Dragging works too — it is a parallel path, not a fallback — with an 8-pixel threshold so a shaky finger still registers as a tap. Nothing here uses right-click or a long-press menu, and an illegal drop just shakes the card back with no move and no score change.
3. How you win at Klondike solitaire: Build all four suits from ace to king on the foundations — 52 cards in total. On the tableau, cards stack downward in alternating colours; an empty column takes only a king, or a run headed by one; when the table stalls, turn the stock. The moment the fourth foundation fills, the burst fires and the result card rises with your time, move count and the full score arithmetic spelled out.
4. What to do when a solitaire game gets stuck: Two different situations, told apart on purpose. If the table has nothing to move but the stock still might help, the stock pulses twice and a line tells you to turn it. If playing out every remaining turn and redeal produces no legal move at all, a neutral banner appears above the table with three ways out: take one move back, replay the same deal, or deal another. The banner never covers the table and never claims the deal is unwinnable — a couple of take-backs really can open a different route.
5. How to change difficulty and play the daily deal: Open the deal panel with New deal and you get four switches: draw (turn 1 or turn 3), redeals (1 for challenge, 3 for classic, unlimited for relaxed), where the deal comes from (checked deals, pure shuffle, or deal of the day), and scoring (standard or off). Defaults are turn 1, unlimited redeals and checked deals — the friendliest combination. The daily deal is derived from the date on your own device, so everyone gets the same one and it still works with the network unplugged.

📖 Rules & variants

Quick reference. 1) Goal: build each suit ace to king on the four foundations, 52 cards. 2) Tableau: seven columns, one card in the first and seven in the last, only the bottom card of each face up — 28 cards. 3) Stock and waste: the remaining 24 sit face down; a tap turns one card (or three, on turn 3) onto the waste, and only the top waste card can be played. 4) Stacking: one rank lower and the opposite colour, so a red 8 on a black 9. 5) Empty columns: kings only, or a run headed by a king. 6) Winning: all four foundations at thirteen cards.

Full rules. One standard 52-card deck, no jokers. Spades and clubs are black, hearts and diamonds red, and the rank order runs ace low to king high. There are exactly five legal moves: stack the waste top, a column's bottom card or a foundation top onto a face-up card one rank higher of the opposite colour; move a king, or a run headed by a king, into an empty column; send the waste top or a column's bottom card to its own foundation (aces onto an empty pile, otherwise one rank above the current top); move a whole descending, strictly alternating run of face-up cards from one column to another — face-down cards never travel; and turn the stock, which becomes a redeal once the stock is empty, tipping the waste back over with its order intact. Whenever a move exposes a face-down card, it turns itself over, and that turn belongs to the same move for the purposes of undo.

Scoring (standard). A card to a foundation is +10. Turning a face-down card is +5. Waste to tableau is +5. Pulling a card back off a foundation is −15. Every redeal from the second one onward is −20. Turning the stock and moving between columns are worth nothing. Winning adds +100 plus a time bonus: 1000 if you finish inside 30 seconds, otherwise 30000 divided by your seconds, capped at 1000. The displayed score never drops below zero, but the real figure is kept underneath — so undoing a penalty puts the display back exactly where it was. Undo itself is never penalised and never runs out.

Turn 1 versus turn 3. On turn 1 each tap turns a single card, so all 24 stock cards pass under your hand one at a time; that is the default and the right choice while you are learning. On turn 3 each tap turns three and only the top one is playable, which strands two cards out of every three until you clear cards ahead of them and shift the grouping. Rules, scoring and win condition are identical — only your access to the stock changes. The second switch is redeals: 1 is billed as challenge, 3 as classic, unlimited as relaxed, because a difficulty name reads better than a count. The third is where the deal comes from: checked deals are verified by a solver before they reach you, a pure shuffle is exactly that (roughly one deal in five cannot be won at all), and the deal of the day is fixed for the calendar date on your device.

What a checked deal actually promises. It promises that a winning line exists — not that it is easy, and not that the line you happen to take is the right one. You can still get stuck on a checked deal, and that is the moment to take a few moves back rather than deal again. The built-in pool was verified offline with the same solver under the strictest setting, a single redeal, so raising redeals to three or unlimited can only make the same deal easier. When you ask for a fresh checked deal, the page searches for one a frame at a time and quietly falls back to the pool if the budget runs out — the fallback deals are verified the same way, so the promise is not watered down. One more thing the solver deliberately cannot do: it answers 'found a line' or 'did not find one within budget', and never declares a deal unwinnable.

About win rates, one checkable number only. The academic result for thoughtful Klondike — a solver that can see every face-down card — is 81.945% ± 0.084% (arXiv 1906.12314 / JAIR). That is the ceiling for an omniscient player, not your win rate and not this page's; we publish no win-rate statistics of our own, because adding another figure to a set of numbers that already contradict each other helps nobody. The 33%, 25%, 60% and 40% you will find elsewhere each belong to a different rule set and a different way of counting, and none of them can be used to correct another.

Five tactics that actually move the needle. First, when you have a choice, play the move that turns a face-down card, and favour the column hiding the most of them — face-down cards are the only information you are missing. Second, send aces and twos up immediately; hold everything else on the table where it can still catch a card. Third, an empty column is the most expensive thing you own: save it for a king instead of plugging it with a low card. Fourth, on turn 3, count the cycle and remember which cards are stranded mid-group, then clear a card ahead of them to shift the grouping. Fifth, look at all seven bottom cards and one pass of the stock before you touch anything, and decide which column is this deal's way in.

A worked opening, four moves. The first column holds a single ace of spades: tap it, tap the spade slot, +10, and the column is now empty. The sixth column ends in the king of spades — move it into that empty column and the sixth column turns a face-down card, +5. Now the queen of hearts from the third column goes onto that king (red on black) and the third column turns a card, +5. Finally the jack of clubs from the seventh column goes onto the queen (black on red), turning another card, +5. Four moves in: 25 points, four moves, and the face-down count is down from 21 to 18. That is the rhythm of the whole game — trade every move for a card turned over.

❓ FAQ