🃏 Klondike Solitaire
The classic single-player card game! Move cards in alternating colors and descending order, and stack all four suits into the foundations to win 🏆
Named After a Gold Rush, Shipped With Every PC
The game family is properly called patience (British) or solitaire (American), and this variant takes its name from the Klondike region of the 1890s Yukon gold rush, where prospectors supposedly killed the long winters with it. Its modern ubiquity has a precise origin: Microsoft bundled Solitaire with Windows 3.0 in 1990 — officially to teach a generation of office workers how to drag and drop with a mouse. It worked, arguably too well: Klondike became a plausible candidate for the most-played computer game in history, and the cascading-cards victory animation is burned into collective memory. The version you're playing uses the same classic ruleset, plus an undo button the 1990 original never gave you.
Strategy, in Priority Order
- Reveal face-down cards above all else. Hidden cards are your only information deficit; when two moves are legal, take the one that flips a card.
- Attack the big piles first. The rightmost tableau column hides six cards, the leftmost none. Dig into the deep piles early — left too long, they're where deals go to die.
- Aces and twos go up immediately; everything higher deserves a pause. Tableau cards are workbench material — send a red 5 to the foundation too early and you lose the landing spot that black 4 needed.
- Choose your kings. Empty columns are the scarcest resource in the game. Before parking the first available king, check which color queen and jack you'll need to build beneath it — the wrong-colored king can waste the slot entirely.
- Don't machine-gun the stock. After every draw, rescan the tableau for newly legal moves before drawing again.
- Undo is a tool, not a sin. Explore a line, hit a wall, back up, branch differently — treating the deal as a search tree is both stronger and more fun than playing it as a slot machine.
The Solvability Numbers (or: Losing Isn't Your Fault)
Klondike earned the nickname "one of the most important unsolved problems in applied mathematics" (half-joking, from a Stanford statistician) because its exact win probability resisted analysis for decades. Computational studies of "Thoughtful Solitaire" — Klondike with all card positions known — put the theoretical solvability of draw-1 deals at roughly 79–82%. But you don't have X-ray vision: with hidden information and human play, real win rates hover around 40-something percent, and some deals are provably lost from the first move.
The practical takeaway: when the stock has cycled twice with no new tableau moves, the deal is dead — redealing is correct play, not surrender. And if you want to improve rather than churn, use undo to rewind to the last branch point and try the other line; post-mortems teach more than fresh deals.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the movement rules again?
Tableau stacks build down in alternating colors (red 7 on black 8); any correctly ordered run moves as a unit; empty columns take kings only. Foundations build up by suit from ace to king — fill all four to win.
What happens when the stock runs out?
The waste pile flips back into a fresh stock — unlimited redeals in this version. If the same cards keep cycling with nothing playable, the deal is locked; start a new game.
How does scoring work?
Points come from flipping face-down cards and moving cards to the foundations, with a time bonus for fast completion. Efficient play and winning play are conveniently the same thing.
Can I move a card back off a foundation?
Occasionally useful when you need it as a tableau landing spot — but it costs the points it earned. Better habit: hold cards above 2 on the tableau until you're sure nothing needs to build on them.