Solitaire

How to play Klondike solitaire

Klondike is the solitaire — the one-player card game most people simply call “Solitaire.” A standard 52-card deck is shuffled and dealt into seven tableau piles of one to seven cards, with only the top card of each pile face up. The remaining 24 cards form the stock. Your goal is to move all 52 cards onto the four foundations, one per suit, built upward from Ace to King.

On the tableau you build downward in alternating colours: a red Six goes on a black Seven, a black Jack on a red Queen. You can move a single face-up card or a whole face-up run — a card plus everything stacked on top of it — as one unit, as long as the bottom card of the run lands legally. Only a King (or a run led by a King) may move into an empty column. When a face-down card is uncovered it turns face up, and cards on the foundations can come back down to the tableau when that helps.

Click the stock to deal cards to the waste. In draw 1 you turn one card at a time and every card gets a look; in draw 3 you turn three at once and only the top card of the waste is playable, which is the classic harder game. When the stock runs out, click it again to turn the waste over and go through it once more — this version allows unlimited redeals in both modes, and cycling always brings the cards around in the same order. The undo button (or Ctrl/⌘+Z) takes back any action, one step at a time, and every action you take — moves, draws, recycles and undos — adds one to the move counter. Once the stock and waste are empty and every card is face up, a Finish button plays the rest to the foundations for you.

Strategy that actually wins games

• Turn face-down cards over before anything else. Hidden cards are the only real obstacle in Klondike, so when two moves are both legal, prefer the one that flips a card. All else being equal, dig at the piles with the most cards still buried — the fourth through seventh columns hide the deep trouble.
• Do not empty a column without a King ready for it. An empty space that sits waiting for a King you cannot reach is a wasted excavation. And prefer the King whose Queen of the opposite colour you can actually see — a King that can never grow a run just blocks the column all over again.
• Do not rush low cards to the foundations. Aces and Twos should go up immediately, but a Three or Four you send up early may be exactly the card a black Two or red Three needed as a landing spot. A useful habit: keep the foundations roughly level, and avoid building any suit more than two or three ranks above the others until the endgame is safe.
• In draw 3, count the wave. Only every third stock card surfaces on a given pass, so the reachable cards repeat in a fixed pattern — until you play one from the waste, which shifts the whole sequence by one and brings a fresh set within reach. Sometimes the strongest play is a deliberately “pointless” waste play made purely to change which cards the next cycle offers.
• Move cards from the tableau before drawing when both are possible. Tableau moves uncover new information for free; the stock will still be there afterwards. But do not make tableau moves that achieve nothing — shuffling a run between two black Eights reveals nothing and can bury a card you need.

About this version

This is duplixo’s own implementation of Klondike — free, with no sign-up and no ads sitting on top of the cards. Your game is saved on your device as you play and resumes if you close the tab; your wins, best time, fewest moves and streaks live in the stats panel, stored only in this browser. It plays with a mouse, by touch, or entirely from the keyboard — every card is a real button, so you can Tab to a card, press Enter to pick it up and Enter again on its destination. Undo is unlimited, and both draw modes are always available.

One honest note: new deals here are genuinely random, and random Klondike deals are not guaranteed to be winnable. Roughly four in five deals are theoretically solvable, but careless play loses a large share of those — which is exactly what makes the game interesting. If a deal defeats you, the loss is recorded and the next shuffle is a clean slate.

Klondike itself is a public-domain patience game. It was popularised in the 1890s — the name comes from the Klondike gold rush — and became the world’s most-played card game a century later when a version of it shipped with early desktop computers, where it famously taught a generation to use a mouse by dragging cards. The rules implemented here are the standard ones: seven tableau piles, foundations by suit, draw 1 or draw 3, unlimited passes through the stock.

Prefer a game where nothing is hidden and skill decides everything? Try FreeCell — all 52 cards face up from the first move, with numbered deals you can share. For a two-deck challenge, Spider Solitaire lets you pick one, two or four suits. Or trade cards for tiles with Mahjong Solitaire, where every deal is guaranteed clearable.