Solitaire

Where to start

Solitaire Classic

Klondike — the one people mean when they say "solitaire". Draw from the stock, build the four foundations from ace to king, and use the seven tableau columns as your workspace. Roughly four deals in five are winnable, so a loss usually means there was a line you missed.

▶ Play Solitaire Classic

Spider Solitaire

Two decks, ten columns, and sequences you build down in suit until a full king-to-ace run clears itself off the board. Start on one suit while you learn the shape of it; two and four suits are a genuinely different game.

▶ Play Spider Solitaire

FreeCell

Every card is face up from the first move, and almost every deal is winnable — which makes this the thinker's solitaire. The four free cells are temporary parking, and how many you leave empty decides how long a sequence you can move.

▶ Play FreeCell

Pyramid Solitaire

Pair cards that add up to 13 and strip the pyramid from the bottom up. Kings go on their own. Short, sharp rounds, and the skill is in reading which pairs you'd strand by taking the obvious one first.

▶ Play Pyramid Solitaire

Tri Peaks Solitaire

Clear three overlapping peaks by picking cards one above or one below the waste pile. Long chains build fast, which makes it the quickest solitaire here — most rounds are over inside a few minutes.

▶ Play Tri Peaks Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire

Tiles instead of cards: match free identical pairs and take the layout apart from the outside in. Free means nothing on top and one long side clear, which is the whole skill — thinking two layers ahead.

▶ Play Mahjong Solitaire

Klondike Solitaire

Klondike with the full ruleset: draw three from the stock, keep score, and flip to draw-one if you want the gentler game. The same deal plays very differently under each — draw-three is the version the purists mean.

▶ Play Klondike Solitaire

Golf Solitaire

Play cards one rank above or below the waste and try to clear the board; whatever is left counts as strokes. Nine deals make a course, so a bad hole is recoverable — the quickest, most snackable solitaire here.

▶ Play Golf Solitaire

Gin Rummy

The two-player classic against a computer opponent that actually watches your discards. Build runs and sets, knock when your deadwood is low, and play a full match to a hundred points.

▶ Play Gin Rummy

Which solitaire should you play?

They share a deck and almost nothing else. Pick by the kind of thinking you're in the mood for.

• Klondike — the classic. Some luck of the deal, quick to pick up, satisfying to finish.
• FreeCell — pure logic. Nearly every deal is solvable, so a loss is on you, not the shuffle.
• Spider — the long game. One suit is gentle, four suits will keep you busy for a while.
• Pyramid — arithmetic and pattern reading, in short rounds.
• Tri Peaks — the fastest. Chain cards together and clear three peaks against the clock of your own patience.
• Golf — Tri Peaks' even quicker cousin. Clear seven columns one rank up or down at a time, and count what's left as strokes.
• Yukon — Klondike with no stock and messy group moves. Every card is dealt from the start, so it is all excavation.
• Forty Thieves — two decks, same-suit builds and one pass through the stock. The hardest game on this page by some distance.
• Mahjong Solitaire — the same matching instinct, played on tiles instead of cards.

Rules of Klondike solitaire, briefly

Deal seven columns, the first with one card and the seventh with seven, each with only the top card face up. The rest becomes the stock.

Build the four foundations up by suit from ace to king. Build the tableau columns down in alternating colours — a red six goes on a black seven. A run of cards moves as one unit if it is already in sequence.

Only a king can go into an empty column, which is why emptying one is worth planning for rather than stumbling into. Turn the stock when you run out of moves, and remember that flipping a face-down card is usually worth more than a tidy-looking merge.

Other card games worth a round

Solitaire is the single-player end of the deck. If you'd rather play against someone, the rest of the grid above covers it: Hearts and Spades are the classic trick-taking pair, Gin Rummy is the head-to-head duel of draws and knocks, Crazy Eights is the fast one everyone already knows, and Dominoes and Dice Duel swap the cards out entirely.

All of them run in the same browser tab with nothing to install, so switching between them costs you a click.

Playing on a phone, tablet or Chromebook

Every game here is HTML5, so it runs on whatever browser you already have — no Flash, no plugin, no app store. On a phone the layouts stack for a portrait screen and cards respond to a tap rather than a drag.

Because they're ordinary web pages, they also load on managed devices like school and work Chromebooks, where installing anything is usually blocked.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

If you want the longer write-up rather than the grid:

• Klondike Solitaire: rules, scoring and strategy — why hidden cards set the order you dig, when to hold a card back, and the draw-3 stock trick.
• Pyramid Solitaire: the pairs that make 13 — the six pairs, why to look underneath before the easy pair, and what the three stock passes are for.
• Spider Solitaire: rules and strategy — why empty columns decide every game, when to deal, and what changes from 1 suit to 4.
• FreeCell: rules and the supermove formula — how many cards you can really move, which cards to dig out first, and why a loss is always a wrong move.
• Types of solitaire: Klondike vs Spider vs FreeCell — Decks, win rates, minutes per game and luck-vs-skill for seven variants, side by side.
• Hearts, Spades, Gin Rummy and Crazy Eights — four card games worth actually learning
• Free puzzle games — the same unhurried feeling, without a deck
• All games — the full catalogue