How to play solitaire

When someone says "solitaire" without qualifying it, they mean Klondike — one deck, seven columns, four piles to fill from Ace to King. It is the game Windows shipped in 1990 and the game almost everyone learns first. This guide teaches it from an empty table: how to set it up, what every move is allowed to do, and how to think through your first game.

Everything here transfers. Once you can play Klondike, the vocabulary and the instincts carry into Spider, FreeCell, and every other variation on the map of solitaire games.

What you need

One standard 52-card deck, no jokers. That is the entire equipment list. Playing on a screen removes the only genuinely tedious part — shuffling and dealing 52 cards by hand — which is why solitaire is one of the rare classic games that is arguably better digital than physical.

How to set up solitaire

The deal is fixed, and it is worth learning by hand once even if you only ever play online, because the shape of the board explains most of the rules.

1. Deal seven columns, left to right. The first column gets one card, the second two, the third three, and so on up to seven. Deal one card at a time across the row, skipping columns that are already complete.
2. Turn the last card of each column face up. Everything beneath stays face down. You have now dealt 28 cards, of which 21 are face down.
3. Put the remaining 24 cards aside as the stock, face down, in one pile. Space beside it becomes the waste, where drawn cards land face up.
4. Leave room above the columns for four foundations. They start empty; the four Aces will open them as they turn up.

That is the whole setup: seven columns (the tableau), a stock, a waste, and four empty foundations. If a term here is unfamiliar, the glossary defines every one of them.

The rules

The goal is to build all four foundations from Ace up to King, one for each suit. You win when all 52 cards have been moved there. Four rules govern how cards move:

• Foundations build up by suit, starting at the Ace. The Ace of hearts, then the two of hearts, then the three, and so on to the King. Nothing may go to a foundation out of order.
• Tableau columns build down in alternating colors. A black six goes on a red seven; a red five goes on that black six. You may move a single card or an entire ordered run of cards, as long as the run lands on a card of the opposite color and the next rank up.
• Empty columns take Kings only. Not a Queen, not a stray seven — a King, or a King with a sequence already built beneath it.
• The stock feeds the waste. Click the stock to turn cards over — one at a time in Turn 1, three at a time in Turn 3, where only the top of each group of three is playable. The top card of the waste can be played to the tableau or a foundation. When the stock runs out, the waste turns over and becomes the stock again.

Turning a face-down tableau card face up is automatic and free: whenever you remove the card covering it, it flips. That single mechanic is the engine of the whole game.

Your first game, move by move

Sit on your hands for a moment before the first move. Solitaire punishes speed early and forgives almost nothing later, so read the whole board first: which columns are deepest, which face-up cards can already accept a partner, and whether any Aces or twos are showing.

1. Send Aces and twos up immediately. They can never be useful in the tableau, so there is no cost to playing them and every reason to open the foundations early.

2. Make the move that flips the most valuable face-down card. The seven-card column hides six unknowns; the two-card column hides one. Digging into deep columns early is almost always right, because information you gain in the first minute shapes every decision after it.

3. Take stock moves only when the tableau is exhausted. Cards you draw are still available next pass; cards you bury are not. Work the table first.

4. Do not empty a column without a King ready. An empty column you cannot fill is a hole in the board — it looks like progress and functions like a dead end. Check that a King is showing, or reachable, before you clear the last card off a column.

5. Hold back low cards you might need. Sending every card to the foundations as soon as it is legal feels productive, but a red three still sitting in the tableau might be the only place a black two can land. Keep one card of each color and low rank in play when you can — the deeper version of this idea is in our Klondike strategy guide.

Five mistakes beginners make

1. Drawing from the stock too early. The most common way to lose a winnable deal. Every tableau move should be considered before you touch the stock.
2. Rushing cards to the foundations. Once a card is on a foundation it cannot come back in most rulesets. Aces and twos, yes. Sevens, think twice.
3. Emptying a column with no King in sight. As above — an unfillable empty column is worse than the card that was sitting there.
4. Ignoring the deep columns. Six face-down cards will not reveal themselves. Deals are usually lost in the columns you avoided, not the ones you played.
5. Treating a loss as a mistake. Around two thirds of Klondike deals are lost by typical players, and some cannot be won at all. Judge yourself over fifty games, not one.

How scoring works

Casual play needs no score at all — finishing is the score. Where scoring exists, two systems dominate. Standard scoring awards points for cards reaching the foundations and for turning face-down cards over, with a time bonus for fast wins. Vegas scoring treats the game as a wager: you "buy" the deck for $52 and earn $5 for every card that reaches a foundation, so a perfect game returns $260 and most games lose money. Both are explained in full on the Klondike rules page.

Where to go next

You now know the game that gave every other variation its vocabulary. Three natural next steps, in increasing order of difficulty:

• Play Klondike until wins stop feeling accidental, then try Turn 3, which draws three cards at a time and roughly halves the win rate.
• 1-suit Spider introduces two decks and long King-to-Ace runs without punishing beginners — the gentlest way into the Spider family.
• FreeCell deals every card face up and asks you to solve rather than discover. Nearly every deal is winnable, which means every loss is genuinely yours.

If you would rather see the whole landscape first, the types of solitaire page maps every major family and what makes each one different.

Frequently asked questions