Easy Solitaire

Why it is easier

What "easy" actually changes

Most sites that offer an easy solitaire mean draw-one instead of draw-three, and stop there. Draw-one helps, but it is not what makes Klondike frustrating. Two things do: twenty-one cards you cannot see, and the rule that only a king may enter an empty column.

This page attacks both. By default the tableau deals face up, so the deal is information rather than a gamble, and any card can take a space, so the board can actually be reorganised. Those two switches account for most of the difference between this and the standard game.

The rest are conveniences. Aces starting on the foundations skips a slow opening; any-colour stacking roughly doubles your legal moves; the free cells give you somewhere to put a blocker. None of them changes the goal, and every one of them is a checkbox you can clear.

Every switch

What each option does, and how much it helps

The panel sits directly above the board. Changing anything takes effect on the next deal.

Pick a setting

Where to put the dial

The defaults are deliberately generous. Most people should move away from them fairly quickly, because a game you cannot lose stops being interesting faster than a game you cannot win.

Habits worth building

Playing well, even with the help on

The assists remove the ways a deal can be unwinnable; they do not remove the skill. Three habits decide most games here, and all three carry straight over to standard Klondike when you are ready for it.

Reveal before you tidy. Even with the tableau face up, some moves open the board and some only rearrange it. A move that lets you reach a card you could not touch before is worth more than one that makes a column look neater.

Plan the whole run, not the next card. Because you can see everything, you can actually trace a sequence four or five moves ahead — which cards move, what that exposes, what goes up. This is the single biggest advantage the face-up option gives you and most players never use it.

Treat empty columns as tools, not tidiness. With relaxed columns on, a space will take anything, so it is tempting to fill one immediately. Leave it open until you know what it is for: a space is how you unpick a badly ordered column, and there is rarely a hurry.

Still losable

What can still go wrong

A winnable deal is not a won deal, and the assists create their own traps. The most common is the foundation rush: with all four aces already up, it is tempting to send every low card straight to a foundation. Do that and the tableau loses the landing spots it needed, and a deal the solver certified as winnable becomes unwinnable in about six moves.

Relaxed columns invite the same mistake in a different shape. Because any card can fill a space, it is easy to drop something into an empty column just to tidy up — and an empty column filled with a card that nothing builds on is no longer an empty column.

Undo is unlimited, so neither is fatal here. But if you plan to move to the classic game, both are habits worth not forming.

Still not automatic

How this compares with the standard game

The row worth noticing is FreeCell. If what you like about this page is that nothing is hidden and spaces are usable, FreeCell gives you both as the actual rules of a classic game rather than as training wheels — and nearly every FreeCell deal is solvable without any solver filtering them first.