When someone says solitaire, this is the game they mean: seven columns, four foundations, a stock you turn over hoping for the card you need. Most people learned it on a Windows PC and have played it the same way for thirty years, which is exactly why most people also lose deals they could have won. Klondike is not FreeCell. You cannot see everything, some deals are genuinely lost before you touch a card, and luck is part of the contract. But inside that luck there is a lot of skill, most of it about the order you dig and the cards you refuse to play.
How does Klondike Solitaire work?
One deck, 52 cards. Twenty-eight are dealt into seven tableau columns: one card in the first column, two in the second, up to seven in the seventh, with only the top card of each column face up. The other 24 form the stock. Four foundation piles, one per suit, start empty and are built from Ace up to King. On the tableau you build downward in alternating colours, a red 6 on a black 7, and a face-up run in sequence moves as a unit. When a column empties, only a King, or a run headed by a King, can take the space. When you run out of moves you turn the stock onto the waste pile, one card or three at a time depending on the variant, and play from the top of the waste. Get all 52 cards onto the foundations and you have won.
How to play Klondike (step by step)
- Scan the seven face-up cards and make every move that sends a card to a foundation or onto another column.
- Flip a face-down card whenever a move exposes one; that is the real currency of the game.
- Turn the stock and play what you can from the waste, preferring moves that free face-down cards over moves that merely tidy.
- Send Aces and twos home as soon as they appear, and be slower with everything above that.
- Empty a column only when you have a King ready for it, and pick the King whose Queen you can actually reach.
- Keep cycling the stock until every card is face up; from there the deal is a tidy-up, and ours will finish it for you.
Face-down cards are the whole problem
Every card you cannot see is a card you cannot plan around, and at the start twenty-one of the twenty-eight tableau cards are face down. So the first rule of Klondike is simple: given two moves that are otherwise equal, take the one that flips a card. Given a choice of columns, dig in the one hiding the most, because the seventh column has six face-down cards under its top one and the first column has none. A move that exposes a hidden card is worth more than one that builds a pretty run, and far more than one that moves a card from the waste onto the tableau for the sake of moving it.
Do not rush cards to the foundations
Aces and twos go home immediately; nothing on the tableau ever needs them. From three upward, slow down. A black 5 sitting on the foundation cannot hold a red 4 any more, and if that red 4 is the card standing between you and a buried column, you have just thrown away the parent it needed. The rule that serves most players: play a card home when the two cards of the opposite colour one rank below it are already on the foundations or already settled where they need to be, and otherwise leave it in play. Our version lets you drag a card back down if you change your mind, but under the classic scoring that costs fifteen points, and the habit of pausing before you send a card home is cheaper.
Empty columns and the King problem
An empty column in Klondike is only useful if you have a King to put in it, so emptying one with no King in hand costs you a workspace and gains nothing. When you do have the choice, think about the Queen. A red King wants a black Queen next; if both black Queens are buried deep, that King is going to sit alone in its column for a long time, and a column holding one idle King is barely better than an empty one. Choose the King whose next few cards are reachable, and if a King is already face up at the head of a long column, moving it out first is usually the play, because it frees whatever it was sitting on.
Draw-1 or draw-3, and the stock rhythm
In draw-1 you see every stock card in turn and the game is mostly about patience. In draw-3 you see only every third card until you play something, and that is the version the purists mean. Here is the trick most people never notice: the stock's order does not change between passes. Turn through the whole stock without playing anything and you will see exactly the same three-card groups next time round. The moment you play one card from the waste, everything behind it shifts by one, and a different set of cards becomes the top of each group. That is why a single waste play in draw-3 is often worth making even when it looks pointless, and why turning through the stock once, purely to read it, is a legitimate opening move.
Klondike Solitaire here deals draw-3 by default with a one-key toggle to draw-1 (press D), and remembers your choice. The stock recycles as often as you need in both modes. Under the classic scoring it uses, every card to a foundation is worth ten, a card from the waste to the tableau five, every face-down card you flip five more, pulling a card back off a foundation costs fifteen, and in draw-1 each recycle of the stock costs a hundred. If you want the gentler version, Solitaire Classic plays the same deal with tap-to-move, a timer and a move count instead of points, and an undo that even un-recycles the stock.
Undo is for reading, auto-finish is for the end
Press U to take a move back, as many times as you need. Use it the way a chess player uses analysis: try the line, see what it exposes, take it back if the flipped card was not the one you needed. The stats the game keeps in your browser, games played, games won, best score, best time and fewest moves, record the finished deal, not the detours. Once every card is face up the deal is decided, and the Auto button (or A) runs the remaining cards home in one cascade so you do not have to drag fifty-two cards one at a time. Double-click any card that belongs on a foundation and it goes there on its own.
How many Klondike deals can be won?
More than most people manage. With every card's position known, roughly 82 percent of Klondike deals are solvable, a figure that comes from computer analysis of what researchers call thoughtful solitaire. Playing normally, with the cards face down, a skilled human wins closer to 43 percent, and draw-3 cuts that again. The gap between those numbers is the room you have to improve in. When you lose, it was sometimes the deal and more often the order you dug in.
Where Klondike comes from
Patience games are first described in Germany in the late 18th century and reached Britain and America over the following hundred years through collections such as Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience. The seven-column layout appears in print as "Seven-Card Klondike" in the 1907 edition of Hoyle's Games; the connection to the Klondike gold rush is usually assumed but has never been documented, and in America the game was long called Canfield, a name England uses for a different game. It became the most played computer game in history when Wes Cherry, a summer intern at Microsoft, wrote Microsoft Solitaire and it shipped with Windows 3.0 in May 1990, partly to teach a generation of new users how to drag and drop with a mouse.
Frequently asked questions
Is every Klondike Solitaire deal winnable?
No. About 82 percent of deals can be won if you could see every card, and a good player with the cards face down wins somewhere around four in ten, fewer in draw-3. Some deals are lost before the first move, which is what separates Klondike from FreeCell.
Should I play draw-1 or draw-3?
Draw-1 is easier and better for learning the shape of the game. Draw-3 is the standard version, and its extra difficulty comes from seeing only every third stock card; playing one card from the waste shifts which cards you can reach on the next pass.
Why can't I move a card into the empty column?
Because only a King, or a run starting with a King, can fill an empty tableau column in Klondike. That is also why emptying a column is only worth doing once you have a King ready to go there.
If Klondike's luck starts to grate, the FreeCell guide covers the variant where every card is visible and almost every deal can be won, and the Spider Solitaire guide takes the two-deck game apart. Our comparison of the whole family sets them side by side, and every solitaire we host sits on the solitaire page.
Play Klondike Solitaire free in your browser: draw-3 or draw-1, classic scoring, unlimited undo and auto-finish, on a phone or a desktop, with nothing to download. Flip the hidden cards first, hold the high ones back, and see how far past four in ten you can get.