Klondike Solitaire

What Is Klondike Solitaire?

Klondike is the solitaire variant most people are describing when they say "solitaire". One deck, seven tableau columns, four foundations, and a single objective: move every card into ordered suit piles from Ace to King. It is the game that shipped on early desktop computers, which is why the layout is familiar even to people who never learned its name.

The rules fit on an index card. The skill does not. Klondike is one of the few solitaire games where the same deal can be won or lost purely on the order of moves, and most losses are traceable to a legal move made one turn too early. That gap between "legal" and "correct" is the whole game.

Every Klondike game here is free, runs in your browser in full screen, and needs no download or account. Undo is unlimited — a bad move costs a click.

How to Play Klondike Solitaire

The deal and the rules are short enough to state completely.

The layout

Seven tableau columns are dealt left to right. Column one gets one card, column two gets two, and so on to column seven. Only the top card of each column is face up. The remaining 24 cards form the stock pile, and four empty foundation slots sit above the tableau.

The four moves

• Tableau to tableau. Place a face-up card on a card one rank higher and of the opposite color — a red 6 onto a black 7. A run already built in alternating descending order moves as a single block.
• Tableau to foundation. Start a foundation with an Ace, then build upward in suit: 2, 3, up to King. Each foundation holds exactly one suit.
• Stock to waste. Turn cards from the stock one at a time (Turn 1) or three at a time (Turn 3).
• Empty column. Only a King, or a run beginning with a King, may be moved into an empty tableau column.

Winning

All four foundations complete, Ace through King, one suit each. Most versions auto-complete the last few moves once the position is settled.

Turn 1 vs Turn 3 Klondike

The draw setting is the only difficulty control in standard Klondike, and it matters more than new players expect.

Turn 1 flips a single card from the stock each time, so every card in the stock is reachable on each pass. It is the forgiving setting and the right place to learn.

Turn 3 flips three cards at a time. Only the top of each group of three can be taken, which means roughly a third of the stock is reachable per pass. A card that is buried behind two others may require two full cycles before it becomes playable.

The practical difference is in win rate. From an identical shuffle, a Turn 1 hand is winnable far more often than the Turn 3 version of the same hand. Neither is a different game — the rules are identical — but Turn 3 demands you plan the stock cycle rather than merely reacting to it.

A sensible progression: learn on Turn 1, move to Turn 3 once you can win most hands without undo.

Klondike, Patience and Classic Solitaire

The same game carries three names, and the naming causes more confusion than it should.

Patience is the older English name, and it is still used in Britain. It refers to the same single-player card building game, and specifically to Klondike in most usage.

Classic solitaire is what software vendors called it. When a game menu offers "classic solitaire", it means Klondike with the standard seven-column layout.

Klondike is the most specific of the three. It names the particular layout — seven tableau columns, four foundations, build down in alternating color.

So: Klondike is the layout, patience is the older name for the genre, and classic solitaire is a marketing label for the Klondike layout. All three lead to the same board.

What is genuinely different is the family around it. Spider Solitaire uses two decks and ten columns. FreeCell Solitaire shows every card and adds four holding cells. TriPeaks and Pyramid use neither foundations nor tableau columns. The solitaire page covers the whole family.

Klondike Solitaire Tips and Strategy

Klondike punishes greed. The moves that lose hands are legal, obvious, and premature.

1. Turn over hidden cards first. A move that flips a face-down card is almost always better than one that does not. In Klondike, information is the scarce resource — you are not short of cards, you are short of knowing where they are.
2. Do not send low cards to the foundation early. An Ace on a foundation is safe. But moving a 2 or 3 up can strand a column you still need, and foundations are one-way. Wait until the tableau no longer needs them.
3. Empty a column on purpose. A free column accepts a King and everything built on it. Clearing one gives you the working room to rearrange the rest.
4. Prefer tableau moves to foundation moves. Foundations are permanent; the tableau is where the hand is solved. Building on the tableau keeps your options open.
5. Track the stock before your second pass. Know which cards you have already cycled. In Turn 3, whether to keep going or reset depends entirely on what is still buried.
6. Use undo as a thinking tool. Unlimited undo means the cost of trying a sequence is a click. If a move feels wrong, walk it back and look for the move that flips a card instead.

Klondike Solitaire for Different Players

Klondike is the most accessible solitaire variant and the one to start with.

• Learning card games: Turn 1, with undo on. The rules are visible on the table.
• A short break: a single hand is five minutes at most.
• Playing with a child: take turns on one board. The layout is fully visible, which makes it easy to talk through "why did you move that card".
• A daily habit: many players treat a hand as a coffee-break ritual, and the low time cost suits that.
• A real challenge: Turn 3 without undo. The same board becomes a planning problem.

Every game here plays on desktop, tablet and phone, with no installation and no account.

Klondike Solitaire Scoring and Variations

The standard game has no score — you win or you do not. Several scoring conventions exist around it, and they change how the hand should be played.

Standard play. Binary outcome. Every decision serves the single goal of finishing the four foundations.

Vegas scoring. The game starts with a negative balance equal to the stake, and each card moved to a foundation pays back a fixed amount. Winning means finishing in profit. Vegas scoring punishes the exploratory play that standard Klondike rewards, because every wasted move is real money in the abstract. It is a different game with the same layout.

Timed play. A clock rewards fast pattern recognition over deep planning. Most software offers it as an option and most serious players ignore it.

Deal variants. Double Klondike uses two decks and two sets of foundations. Triple and quadruple versions extend the same idea. They are considerably harder and are aimed at players who find the standard hand too quick.

There is also the draw-three convention covered above, which is best understood as a difficulty setting rather than a separate game.

Klondike Solitaire and Muscle Memory

Klondike has an unusual property among puzzle games: it rewards pattern recognition more than analysis. Experienced players do not calculate; they look at a position and see the move.

That is why the game stays interesting across thousands of hands. The first fifty teach the rules, the next five hundred build the patterns, and after that the game becomes a matter of noticing — which column has a buried King, which suit is nearly complete, whether the stock is worth a second pass.

It is also why undo is worth using deliberately rather than as a safety net. Walking a move back and looking again trains the pattern; accepting a mistake trains nothing.

Klondike vs Other Solitaire Games

Three variants dominate, and they are not interchangeable.

Klondike vs Spider. Klondike is one deck, seven columns, foundations. Spider is two decks, ten columns, and completed runs leave the board. Klondike builds up; Spider assembles and removes. Spider at four suits is considerably harder.

Klondike vs FreeCell. FreeCell deals every card face up, so there is no discovery — only planning. Every FreeCell deal is solvable; not every Klondike hand is. Players who dislike losing to a shuffle prefer FreeCell.

Klondike vs TriPeaks and Pyramid. Those variants clear a layout by pairing or sequencing exposed cards and finish in two or three minutes. Klondike is a full build with a longer horizon.

Klondike vs Mahjong. Mahjong uses tiles and pairing rules. The only shared property is that both are single-player, low-pressure and visible on the board.