Klondike Solitaire — Play Free Online

The setup

Klondike uses one standard deck of 52 cards. The deal builds seven tableau columns of increasing depth: one card in the first column, two in the second, up to seven in the last — 28 cards in all, 21 of them face down. Only the top card of each column starts face up. The remaining 24 cards form the stock, waiting in the corner with a waste pile beside it. Above the table sit four empty foundations, one per suit.

Building the foundations

Foundations are the destination. Each one accepts a single suit, starting with the Ace and climbing in order to the King — A, 2, 3, and so on. Any playable Ace can start a foundation at any time, and cards move up from the tableau or the waste pile. When all four foundations read King, you have won. Most digital versions, including ours, finish the game automatically once every card is face up and the outcome is certain.

Moving cards in the tableau

Tableau building runs the opposite direction: descending rank, alternating colors. A red 9 goes on a black 10, a black 8 on that red 9. Face-up cards in proper sequence move together, and you may split a sequence anywhere — pick up the 8 and everything on it, leaving the 9 behind. Uncovering a face-down card flips it face up, which is how the hidden two-thirds of the deal gradually enters play. An empty column accepts only a King (or a sequence led by one).

The stock and the waste

When the tableau offers nothing, turn to the stock. Each click deals cards to the waste pile — one at a time in Turn 1, three at a time in Turn 3 — and only the top waste card is playable. When the stock empties, the waste is turned over to form a new stock and the cycle continues. This one setting transforms the game: Turn 1 makes every stock card reachable eventually, while Turn 3 hides two cards under every one it shows, and reaching them takes real planning.

Winning and losing

A Klondike game is lost when no legal move improves your position — every tableau move just shuffles known cards, and the stock cycles without offering anything playable. It happens often, and not always through fault: some deals cannot be won at all. The numbers, and what to do about them, are below.

Every card game that ships on a new phone, every "solitaire" app in every store, descends from this layout: seven columns, four foundations, one deck. Klondike is the common ancestor — simple enough to learn from watching, deep enough that a century of players still argue about the right move.

The habit that separates winners from shufflers is the same one that governs Spider: value information above convenience. Twenty-one cards start face down, and every reveal is worth more than almost any tidy-looking rearrangement of the cards you can already see.

What is Klondike Solitaire?

Klondike is a single-deck patience game that surfaced in the late 19th century, its name most likely borrowed from the Klondike gold rush — the theme of digging through layers for buried treasure fits almost too well. It spent decades as the default card game of kitchen tables and office desks before its second, far larger life began: Microsoft shipped it as "Solitaire" with Windows 3.0 in 1990, partly as a friendly tutorial for a then-novel device called the mouse. Dragging cards taught millions of people to drag-and-drop.

The result is arguably the most-played computer game in history. FreeCell joined Windows in 1995 and Spider in the Windows 98 Plus! pack, but Klondike had a five-year head start and the plain name — for most of the world, this game simply is solitaire. The full lineage from 18th-century Patience to the Windows era is traced in our history of solitaire.

How often can you actually win?

Klondike's difficulty is easy to underestimate because the rules are so gentle. The numbers say otherwise. Across large samples of online play without undo, typical players win about 33% of Turn 1 games and about 15% at Turn 3. Perfect play does considerably better — solver studies suggest that most deals are theoretically winnable — but no human sees through 21 face-down cards.

Two lessons hide in those figures. First, losing most of your games is normal, not a verdict — measure yourself over dozens of deals. Second, the gap between typical and possible is wide, which means strategy pays off in Klondike more than its casual reputation suggests.

Strategy that actually works

Klondike strategy fits in a short list, but each item earns its place by reversing an instinct that feels natural and costs games.

• Send Aces and Twos up on sight. They do nothing in the tableau — no card builds on an Ace, and a Two holds at most one. From the 3 upward, slow down: foundation cards can no longer support tableau sequences, so keep the four piles roughly level rather than racing one suit ahead.
• Prefer the move that flips a face-down card. When two moves look equal, the one that reveals a hidden card almost never is. Favor digging in the longer columns — the seventh column hides six cards, the first hides none, so a reveal on the right side of the table is usually worth more.
• Never empty a column without a King ready. Only Kings fill gaps. A column cleared with no King available is a dead space that helps nobody. And when you do have a choice of Kings, prefer the one whose matching Queens of the opposite color are visible.
• Don't burn the stock reflexively. Every card taken from the waste changes which cards subsequent passes will offer — especially at Turn 3, where the stock arrives in groups. Look at the whole table before drawing, and treat a stock pass as a survey run: see what is coming before you commit to taking anything.

Players arriving from Spider will notice the family resemblance — reveal hidden cards, protect your flexibility — and the differences: alternating colors instead of suit-strict runs, and foundations instead of in-place King-to-Ace sequences. The Spider strategy guide makes an instructive contrast, and the glossary covers any unfamiliar term.

Scoring: standard and Vegas

The standard scoring most versions inherit from Microsoft rewards progress and reveals: 5 points for a card dealt from stock to waste played to the tableau, 10 for each card placed on a foundation, 5 for every face-down card turned over, with small penalties for moving a card back off a foundation and, at Turn 1, for recycling the stock. Timed games add a bonus for speed.

Vegas scoring is the interesting one. You start each deal $52 down — a dollar per card — and earn $5 for every card placed on a foundation. Eleven cards breaks even; a won game nets $208. Stock passes are strictly limited: one at Turn 1, three at Turn 3. Vegas mode turns Klondike into a bankroll game where the goal is not to win every deal (you won't) but to finish sessions ahead — an honest frame for a game where a third of deals is a good hit rate.

Klondike vs Spider vs FreeCell

The three great desktop solitaires make a neat spectrum, with Klondike holding the middle ground between luck and calculation.

If you want shorter games with real stakes per decision, stay here — and graduate to Turn 3 when Turn 1 stops resisting. If you want pure calculation, FreeCell shows you every card and dares you to compute. The full head-to-head, including which game fits which kind of player, is in our comparison article.

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