Solitaire (Klondike)
The single-player card game of sorting a shuffled deck into ordered foundations.
- Players1 player
- Play time10 to 20 minutes
- DifficultyBeginner friendly
- OriginNorthern Europe, 18th century, popularized worldwide through printed rule books and later computers
- You'll needA standard 52-card deck, no jokers, and enough table space to lay out seven columns.
Overview
Klondike is the single-player card game most people simply call "solitaire," and it remains one of the most widely played card games in the world, largely because it needs only one player, one deck, and a flat surface. The challenge is to unravel a shuffled deck by moving cards according to strict rules, gradually sorting all 52 cards into four ordered piles by suit.
Games in the broader "patience" family (as solitaire games are known outside North America) date back to at least the late 1700s in Northern Europe. Klondike specifically became the default version most people learn, especially after it shipped as a built-in game on early Windows computers in the 1990s, introducing an entire generation to its rules without a physical deck in hand.
What You Need
You need a single standard 52-card deck with no jokers, and enough flat surface area to lay out seven columns of cards side by side.
Setup
Deal seven columns (called the "tableau"), with the first column containing one card, the second two cards, the third three, and so on up to the seventh column with seven cards. The top card of each column is dealt face up; every other card in each column stays face down. The remaining cards form a face-down stock pile to the side, and four empty spaces are reserved above the tableau for the "foundations," where completed suit sequences will be built.
How to Play
Within the tableau, cards can be moved in descending order with alternating colors — for example, a black 8 can be placed on a red 9. Moving a face-up card that reveals a face-down card beneath it lets you flip that card face up, making it available for play. An entire sequence of correctly ordered, alternating-color cards can be moved together as a group onto another card that fits the sequence. Empty columns (once fully cleared) may only be filled by a king, or a valid sequence starting with a king. Cards can also be sent to the foundations once available: each foundation starts with an ace and builds upward in the same suit, ace through king. When no more tableau moves are available, you flip cards from the stock pile, typically one or three at a time depending on the rule set, to the "waste" pile, and its top card becomes available for play in the tableau or foundations.
How to Win
You win the game by successfully moving all 52 cards onto the four foundations, completing each suit in order from ace to king. Not every shuffled deal can be solved — Klondike is famous for occasionally producing genuinely unwinnable layouts — so a loss doesn't necessarily mean a mistake was made.
Tips
- Uncover face-down cards in the tableau before rushing cards to the foundations.
- Avoid emptying a column too early unless you have a king ready to fill it.
- Move cards to the foundation only when doing so won't block a needed tableau move later.
- Deal through the stock pile methodically rather than randomly, tracking what you've already seen.
- If you get stuck, look for a single card lower in the stock that would unlock a stalled column.
Common Mistakes
- Sending low cards to the foundation too quickly, when they're still needed to build tableau sequences.
- Forgetting that only a king (or a sequence beginning with one) can fill an empty column.
- Overlooking a face-down card that could be flipped with one more available move.
- Assuming every deal is winnable and giving up too early on a solvable one, or the reverse.
Variations
Spider solitaire uses two full decks and builds sequences within a tableau of ten columns, without foundations, and can be played with one, two, or four suits for varying difficulty. FreeCell deals the entire deck face up from the start and adds a small number of free cells for temporarily holding cards, and nearly every FreeCell deal is solvable. Pyramid solitaire arranges cards in a triangular layout and clears pairs of cards that add up to 13.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Depending on how the cards are shuffled, some Klondike deals are mathematically impossible to fully solve, regardless of how well you play.
Drawing one card at a time from the stock generally makes the game easier to win, since every card becomes accessible eventually; drawing three at a time is more traditional but often stricter, since two of every three drawn cards remain temporarily buried.
You can generally move any properly ordered, alternating-color sequence of cards together, as long as every card in that group is already correctly sequenced with the one above it.