Klondike Solitaire

Twenty-eight on the table

How to play Klondike Solitaire

Twenty-eight cards are dealt into seven columns as a staircase: one card in the first, two in the second, and so on to seven in the last. Only the final card of each column is turned face up. That leaves twenty-one cards hidden and twenty-four in the stock.

Two systems run in opposite directions. The four foundations climb from ace to king in a single suit, and every card has to end up there to win. The tableau runs the other way, packing down by rank in alternating colours, and its job is temporary — it exists to hold cards in a useful order while you dig the hidden ones out.

That digging is the whole game. A legal move is easy to find; a move that reveals something is not. Klondike is decided by which face-down card you turn over first and whether the cards you needed were still available when you got there.

A naming question

Is Klondike the same as Solitaire?

Not quite, and the distinction is worth a sentence. Solitaire is the family name for one-player card games — FreeCell, Spider, Pyramid, TriPeaks, Golf and Aces Up are all solitaire. Klondike is one specific game in that family: seven columns, alternating-colour packing, four suit foundations, a draw stock.

It became the default meaning because it shipped with Windows for two decades and taught a generation of office workers to use a mouse. Older British books call the whole family patience, and Klondike itself sometimes appears under that name. On this page Klondike means exactly the ruleset in the table above.

Reading the board

What counts as a legal move

Suits are strict in exactly one place. Foundations must stay in a single suit; the tableau cares only whether a card is red or black.

Kings and spaces

An empty column is not storage

Emptying a column is the most powerful thing you can do in Klondike and the easiest to get wrong. The space is not a free slot: only a king, or a run led by a king, can move into it. Everything else has to wait.

So the question is never "can I empty this column" but "which king goes in it, and what does that king unlock". A king that arrives with a long packed run behind it moves a lot of cards at once. A king sitting alone in a space, with nothing that can build on it, has turned your hard-won column into a dead end.

Colour matters more than players expect. A king only accepts a queen of the opposite colour, so which king takes the space decides which half of your queens can move next.

The stock

The stock is a queue, not a shuffle

Draw a card and it lands face up on the waste. Only that top card is playable; draw again and it is covered by the next one. Nothing else about the stock is visible, which makes it the one part of the board you have to remember rather than read.

When the stock empties, the waste turns back over in exactly the order it went in. There is no shuffle between passes, so the sequence you saw the first time is the sequence you will see again. That is worth more than it sounds: if you noticed the black 4 sitting six cards deep, it will still be six cards deep next time round, and you can count your way back to it.

Draw one with unlimited passes also means every stock card is reachable on every pass. That is not true of draw three, where two cards in every three slide by unseen and playing a waste card changes which cards surface later. It is the main reason this version is the forgiving one, and the main reason a draw-three win is worth more.

Order of play

Klondike Solitaire strategy

Most Klondike advice reduces to one idea: information beats tidiness. A board that looks neat but hides the same twenty-one cards has not improved. The habit worth building is checking your options in a fixed order rather than taking the first legal move you notice.

Why deals get stuck

Why Klondike deals get stuck

These are not the reverse of the advice above. Each is a position that looks survivable and is not, and each one is worth recognising a few moves before it arrives.

An empty column with no king to fill it

Clearing a column feels like progress, but an empty column is worth nothing until a king can reach it. If every king is buried under face-down cards, you have spent real cards to create a space you cannot use.

Both reachable kings in the same colour

A queen needs a king of the opposite colour. If the only kings you can move are both black, every red queen on the board is homeless, and the columns they would have unlocked stay frozen.

Recycling the stock without changing the board

Unlimited recycling makes it feel like there is always another chance. There is not: if you go through the entire stock without making a single move, the next pass deals the identical order into the identical board. That is the honest test for whether a deal is finished.

The famous percentage

Is Klondike Solitaire winnable?

Not every deal. A random shuffle can bury the exact rank and colour you need under cards that only that card could have freed, and unlimited recycling cannot repair a bad order. This page deals genuinely random hands and does not filter for solvable ones, so a dead deal is a real outcome rather than a sign you played badly.

Skill still decides a lot of them. Most losable-but-winnable deals turn on three things: which hidden card you reveal first, which king takes the first empty column, and whether a foundation move removed a card the tableau still needed. Undo is unlimited here so you can rewind a line and see which of those it was.

Other rulesets

Draw one, draw three, and Vegas

Most arguments about Klondike difficulty are really arguments about the stock. Changing how cards leave it changes the game more than any tableau rule does.

Draw one against draw three

Klondike against the games it is confused with

How much of the deck is hidden at the start is the single most useful way to tell these games apart. It predicts how much of each one is planning and how much is luck.

If Klondike frustrates you, the hidden cards are usually why, and FreeCell is the cure — same tableau rule, nothing concealed. If you want the reveal-and-build rhythm in a shorter game, try Forty Thieves for a heavier version or the quick removal games for something lighter.