Types of Solitaire: Klondike vs Spider vs FreeCell (and the Rest of the Family)

There's a reason solitaire shipped on every office computer for a generation. It's the perfect gap-filler — long enough to feel like a game, short enough to abandon the second your coffee's ready. But "solitaire" is really a whole family of card games wearing the same tuxedo, and they play nothing alike. One is a gentle shuffle. Another will stare you down for twenty minutes and still lose. Every variant below sits on our solitaire page; this is the guide to how they differ — how many decks, how often a deal can be won, how long a game takes, and how much of the result is you versus the shuffle.

Klondike vs Spider vs FreeCell: the family at a glance

Rough figures, deliberately. Win rates depend on the exact rules a version uses — draw-one or draw-three, how many passes through the stock — and on the player, so treat these as the order of things rather than precise numbers.

If you only remember one line: Klondike is the familiar one where the deal decides a lot, Spider is the long one where the suit count sets the difficulty, and FreeCell is the fair one where every card is visible and the loss is always yours. The rest of the family bends one rule each until it becomes a different game, and the sections below take them in turn.

Klondike: the one you already know

When someone says "solitaire," they mean this one. Seven columns, four foundation piles, build down in alternating colors and up by suit from Ace to King. Solitaire is the version to start with because the rules live in your muscle memory already — you'll be flipping the stock and dragging red sevens onto black eights before you've finished reading this sentence.

What people forget is how much luck lives inside it. Not every deal is winnable, and part of the quiet skill is knowing when to stop feeding the foundations and instead hold a card back to free up a buried column. Draw-one is forgiving; draw-three is where the real puzzle hides — and Klondike Solitaire deals exactly that game, draw-three with proper scoring and a draw-one toggle when you want the gentler evening. It's the card game equivalent of a walk around the block — low stakes, faintly meditative, and weirdly hard to put down once you're two moves from clearing the board. The Klondike guide covers the scoring, the draw-3 stock trick and why the hidden cards set the order you dig.

FreeCell: solitaire for people who hate losing to luck

If Klondike's randomness annoys you, FreeCell is your game. Every card is dealt face-up from the start, and you get four free cells — little parking spots to stash a card while you untangle the mess underneath. The famous claim is that nearly every FreeCell deal is solvable, which changes the whole mood. A loss here isn't bad luck. It's a wrong move, three turns back, that you're only now paying for.

That makes it the thinker's solitaire. You're not praying for the right card; you're planning a sequence, using those four cells like a chess player sacrificing tempo. Empty a column and suddenly you've got room to maneuver two long runs at once. It's the most rewarding of the bunch when a tangled board finally cracks open, because you know you earned it. The FreeCell guide goes through the supermove limit, which cards to dig out first and why the free cells are a loan rather than storage.

Spider: two decks, eight columns, one long grind

Then there's the big one. Spider Solitaire plays with two full decks and asks you to build complete runs from King down to Ace in a single suit before they clear off the table. On one-suit mode it's a gentle warm-up. Crank it to four suits and it becomes a genuine test of patience and board-reading — you'll spend as much energy avoiding dead columns as building live ones.

Spider is the session you commit to. Where Klondike is a bus ride, this is the whole afternoon. The satisfaction is different too: instead of little foundation drips, you get that big cathartic sweep when a full suited run finally lifts off the board. If you like games that make you feel clever for setting up a move five turns early, this is where solitaire and proper puzzle games start to blur together.

One relative isn't cards at all. Mahjong Solitaire borrowed the name for a tile-matching puzzle, and it has a whole family of its own — the stacked turtle, the flat connect boards, the triple-match variants — on the mahjong page. Same unhurried instinct, different muscle. For the long version, the Spider Solitaire guide covers empty columns, suit discipline and when to deal from the stock.

Pyramid: the short one you keep replaying

The quickest game here by a distance. Pyramid Solitaire stacks twenty-eight cards in a triangle and asks you to clear them in pairs that add up to thirteen — a Queen with an Ace, a Nine with a Four, Kings on their own. Only the cards with nothing resting on them are in play, so the shape of the pyramid does most of the deciding for you.

It lives or dies on one habit: looking underneath before you take the easy pair. Two Sixes sitting side by side are tempting, but if the Seven you need later is buried under both of them you have just walled yourself in. Rounds run about two minutes, which makes it the one to open when you have exactly one minute and a stubborn streak. The Pyramid guide lists the six pairs and the habit of looking underneath first.

Tri Peaks: the fast one, where the streak is the whole game

Same triangle instinct, completely different engine. Tri Peaks Solitaire deals twenty-eight cards into three overlapping pyramids sitting above a single face-up pile, and you take any uncovered card that is exactly one rank above or below whatever is showing. A Seven takes a Six or an Eight. An Ace works both ways — King or Two — so the ranks close into a ring and a run never dies simply because it reached the end of the deck. There is no building, no foundations, nothing to file away by suit. You just walk up and down the ranks for as long as the board lets you.

The catch is the chain. The first card of a run scores ten, the next twenty, the next thirty, so eight cards taken back to back are worth more than twenty ground out one draw at a time — and reaching for the stock resets you to zero and costs twenty points on the way. That inverts the usual solitaire question. It stops being "what can I take" and becomes "what can I take last," because two uncovered cards of the same rank are the classic trap: spend the wrong one and the run stops dead a move early. The peaks still unpick from the bottom up, a card only turning face up once both cards resting on it are gone, so the move that pays least is often the one that opens the board. Every deal is checked for a winning line before it reaches the table, which puts it closer to FreeCell than to Klondike — the game you just lost was one you could have won, and undo is right there if you want to prove it.

Golf, Yukon and Forty Thieves: where to go once Klondike feels solved

The family runs deeper than the famous four, and the next three each bend one rule until it becomes a different game. Golf Solitaire is the sprinter: seven columns face-up, take anything one rank above or below the waste, and whatever you fail to clear counts as strokes on a nine-deal course. It is Tri Peaks with the safety rail removed — no ring around the Ace and King, so every run has a cliff at both ends — and a full hole is over in about a minute.

Yukon Solitaire goes the other way and slows everything down. All fifty-two cards hit the table on the first deal, there is no stock at all, and you may pick up any face-up card with the whole messy heap sitting on top of it. That one permission changes the character completely: it stops being about managing the draw and becomes pure excavation, digging face-down cards out from under deliberately ugly stacks. And when you want the deep end, Forty Thieves is two full decks, builds that must follow suit, one card moved at a time and a single pass through the stock. It is the hardest game on this page and entirely honest about it — most deals are losable, which is precisely why clearing one is worth a small ceremony.

Everything above is you against a shuffle. If you'd rather play against somebody, Hearts, Spades, Gin Rummy and Crazy Eights each get a proper walkthrough in our guide to classic card games online.

So which one do you open?

Quick guide. Five idle minutes and no interest in thinking hard — Klondike. Want a puzzle you can actually solve if you're careful — FreeCell. Settling in for the long haul — Spider, and bump the suits up when it gets boring. Two minutes and a stubborn streak — Pyramid. Chasing a score rather than a solve — Tri Peaks, and keep your hands off the stock. One minute flat — Golf, and count your strokes. Fancy digging rather than drawing — Yukon. Feeling genuinely brave — Forty Thieves, and lower your expectations. Want somebody to outwit rather than a deck to untangle — the card games guide above. The nice part is they're all free and open instantly, so switching costs you nothing but a click.

And if a full board of cards is more commitment than you want tonight, there's plenty more in the same low-key vein. Our roundup of free puzzle games covers the same calm, one-more-go feeling with tiles, tubes and logic grids, while the brain games that make you smarter pick out the ones that actually give your head a workout. Deal a hand, or don't — either way you're one tab away from a good time. Every game named here sits together on the solitaire and card games page if you would rather just pick one and start.