Reference
Card Game Glossary
Solitaire has been played for more than two centuries, and its vocabulary shows it — a mix of French casino terminology, British patience tradition, and coinages from the Windows era. The result is that Spider, Klondike, and FreeCell often use the same word for slightly different things, or different words for the same thing.
This glossary defines every term you will meet on this site, alphabetically, with a note on which games use it and how. Each entry has its own anchor, so rules and strategy pages link straight to the definition they mean.
A
- Ace
- The lowest-ranked card in every solitaire ordering. In Spider, runs are built downward and end at the Ace; in Klondike and FreeCell, the Ace is the first card sent to each foundation, so finding your Aces early is a top priority.
- Autoplay
- A convenience feature that sends cards to the foundations automatically once they are safe to play. Common in Klondike and FreeCell endgames; Spider has an equivalent in the automatic removal of any completed King-to-Ace run.
B
- Base card
- The card that starts a foundation pile — an Ace in standard Klondike and FreeCell. Some variants deal a random base card and build upward from that rank instead, which is where the related term wrap comes in.
- Build
- To place cards on one another in a prescribed order. Tableau building runs downward (a 7 onto an 8); foundation building runs upward by suit. Spider builds down regardless of suit, Klondike builds down in alternating colors.
- Buried card
- A card trapped beneath others in a pile, unavailable until everything above it moves. Digging out a buried card you need — often an Ace or a low card — is the central excavation problem of Klondike and Spider alike.
C
- Cascade
- The FreeCell name for a tableau column. FreeCell deals all 52 cards face up across eight cascades, which is why the game plays as an open-information puzzle rather than a game of discovery.
- Cell
- A holding space that stores exactly one card. FreeCell provides four of them (the "free cells" of its name), and parking a card in a cell is the game’s signature maneuver — powerful, but each occupied cell shrinks your supermove capacity.
- Column
- A vertical stack of cards in the tableau, fanned so every card is visible. Spider deals ten columns, Klondike seven, and FreeCell eight. An empty column is one of the most valuable resources in any of the three games.
D
- Deal
- Either the initial layout of a game or the act of bringing new cards into play from the stock. In Spider, each stock deal drops ten cards at once — one on every column — and is refused while any column sits empty.
- Deadlock
- A position with no legal moves remaining and no stock left to deal. A deadlock ends the game as a loss; expert players learn to see one forming several moves before it arrives.
- Deck
- A standard set of 52 playing cards in four suits. Klondike and FreeCell use one deck; Spider uses two, for a total of 104 cards and eight complete suit runs to assemble.
E
- Empty column
- A tableau column with no cards in it. In Spider and FreeCell an empty column accepts any card or movable run, making it a workspace for re-sorting stacks. Klondike is stricter: only a King may fill an empty column.
F
- Face card
- A King, Queen, or Jack — the three ranks bearing portraits. In digital solitaire they behave exactly like the numbered cards, ranking 13, 12, and 11 respectively.
- Face-down card
- A card dealt hidden, revealed only when everything on top of it is cleared away. Spider starts with 44 face-down cards and Klondike with 21; FreeCell has none, which is why nearly every FreeCell deal is winnable.
- Foundation
- One of the piles built upward from Ace to King in a single suit — the destination of every card in Klondike and FreeCell. Spider has no foundations: completed runs are assembled directly in the tableau and removed automatically.
- Free cell
- One of the four single-card holding spaces that give FreeCell its name. Any playable card can be parked there and retrieved later, but with only four cells, each one you fill narrows your options.
M
- Maneuver space
- The combined capacity of your empty cells and empty columns — a measure of how many cards you can relocate in one operation. FreeCell strategy is largely the art of protecting maneuver space; the same idea governs Spider’s empty columns.
- Mixed stack
- A descending Spider stack containing more than one suit. Legal to build but impossible to move as a unit, a mixed stack is a debt: every off-suit placement must eventually be unwound one card at a time.
- Move
- Any transfer of a card or movable sequence from one location to another. Under classic Spider scoring each move costs one point, which is why efficient players plan lines instead of shuffling cards hoping for luck.
P
- Patience
- The traditional British name for the whole family of single-player card games that Americans call solitaire. You will still see "patience" in older rulebooks and in most European languages.
- Pile
- Any defined group of cards on the table — a tableau column, a foundation, the stock, or the waste. Rules are always stated per pile: what it accepts, what leaves it, and whether its cards are face up.
R
- Rank
- The numeric value of a card, from Ace (1) through King (13). All tableau building compares ranks: a card may be placed only on the rank directly above it, whatever the game’s suit rules say on top of that.
- Redeal
- Turning the exhausted waste pile back over to form a new stock in Klondike. Casual rules allow unlimited redeals; stricter scoring variants limit you to one or two, or forbid the redeal entirely.
- Reserve
- A group of cards set aside at the deal that can be played from but not built upon, featured in variants like Canfield. FreeCell’s four cells act as a small, player-managed reserve.
- Run
- In Spider, a descending sequence of the same suit — the only kind of stack that moves as a single unit. Building runs is the whole game: complete a King-to-Ace run and it flies off the table.
S
- Safe move
- A move that cannot worsen your position no matter what hidden cards turn up — sending an Ace to the foundation in Klondike is the classic example. Recognizing which "obvious" moves are actually unsafe is a mark of a strong player.
- Sequence
- Cards in consecutive rank order, regardless of suit. In Spider, any descending sequence is legal to build, but only a same-suit sequence — a run — can be picked up and moved together.
- Stock
- The face-down cards not dealt to the tableau, held back for later. Spider’s stock holds 50 cards released in five deals of ten; Klondike’s holds 24, turned over one or three at a time into the waste.
- Streak
- A count of consecutive wins, reset to zero by any loss. Streaks are the stat serious players guard most jealously — you can watch yours grow on our statistics page.
- Suit
- One of the four families — clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades. Suit rules define each game: Spider moves only same-suit runs, Klondike builds in alternating colors, and foundations everywhere are strictly one suit each.
- Supermove
- Moving a whole ordered sequence in FreeCell as if it were one card, using empty cells and columns as intermediate stops. Capacity is (free cells + 1) doubled for each empty cascade — the formula behind every big FreeCell play.
T
- Tableau
- The main playing area where columns are dealt and building happens — ten columns in Spider, seven in Klondike, eight in FreeCell. When players talk about "the table," this is what they mean.
- Talon
- An older name for the waste pile, still common in European rulebooks; some older texts confusingly use it for the stock instead. Modern digital solitaire almost always says "waste."
- Turn
- The Klondike drawing convention: Turn 1 flips one stock card at a time, Turn 3 flips three with only the top playable. The choice roughly doubles the difficulty — about a 33% win rate for Turn 1 versus 15% for Turn 3.
U
- Undo
- Taking back one or more moves. In most digital versions undo is unlimited but still counts against your move total and score. Used well, it is a periscope: try a line, see what is revealed, and commit to the better branch.
- Unwinnable deal
- A deal with no winning line at all, however perfectly played. Rare at 1-suit Spider, a meaningful minority at 4 suits, and famously almost nonexistent in FreeCell. We cover the research in our winnability article.
W
- Waste
- The face-up pile beside the Klondike stock where drawn cards land. Only the top waste card is playable, so the order cards enter the waste — set by your Turn 1 or Turn 3 setting — shapes the whole game.
- Win rate
- The share of games you win, the standard yardstick of solitaire skill. Typical no-undo baselines: about 62% at 1-suit Spider, 28% at 2 suits, 6% at 4 suits. Compare your own numbers on the statistics page.
- Wrap
- Building "around the corner" so the sequence continues King, Ace, 2. Classic Spider, Klondike, and FreeCell all forbid wrapping — the Ace is a hard floor and the King a hard ceiling — but some variant rule sets allow it.
Put the vocabulary to work
Terms stick fastest when you meet them at the table. Deal a hand of Spider Solitaire and watch runs, mixed stacks, and stock deals stop being definitions and become decisions — or start with the complete Spider rules if you want the full picture first. For a deeper tour of where these words came from and why the same term drifts between games, read Solitaire Terms Explained on the blog.