Klondike solitaire

The rules of Klondike

Klondike is the game most people simply call solitaire. The 52 cards are dealt into seven columns: one card in the first column, two in the second, up to seven in the last, with only the top card of each column face up. The other 24 cards are the stock.

• Goal: move every card to the four foundations, one suit each, in order from Ace to King.
• Columns build down in alternating colors: a red 8 on a black 9, then a black 7 on the red 8.
• Runs move together: any face-up cards that are in order can move as one group onto another column.
• Face-down cards turn over as soon as the last face-up card is moved off them.
• Empty columns take only a King, or a run that starts with a King.
• The stock turns cards over onto the waste; the top waste card can be played. When the stock runs out, the waste turns back over to make a new stock.

Draw 1 or Draw 3

In Draw 1, every stock card comes up in turn, so you can always reach the card you need. In Draw 3, three cards come over at a time and only the top one can be played. If you play nothing from the waste, only 8 of the 24 stock cards (every third one) ever reach the top, and the same 8 come up again on every pass. Each card you do play from the waste shifts the order, so different cards come up next time. Stricter traditional rules also limit the passes: one in Draw 1, three in Draw 3.

Strategy tips

• Turn over face-down cards first. Every hidden card is information you don't have yet. When you have a choice, take cards from the column with the most face-down cards.
• Don't rush to the foundations. A card on a foundation can't hold anything any more. Aces and twos can always go up; a higher card is safe once both foundations of the other color already reach one rank below it, because nothing that could sit on it is left in play.
• Only empty a column for a King. An empty column is useless until a King moves in. Pick the King that frees the most face-down cards, or one whose Queen you can move straight after.
• Think before drawing in Draw 3. Playing a card from the waste changes which cards you will see on the next pass, sometimes for the better.
• Use undo to explore. Undo is unlimited here, so try a line of play, and go back if it leads nowhere.

How many games can be won?

Nobody knows exactly for normal play, because the face-down cards hide information. For "thoughtful" solitaire, where every card is known from the start, Charlie Blake and Ian Gent of the University of St Andrews used a computer solver on large samples of random deals: about 82% of Draw 3 deals with unlimited passes can be won, and about 90% of Draw 1 deals. Their study first appeared in 2019 and was later published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. A real player can't see the hidden cards, so the true odds for normal play are lower.

For a sense of how much skill matters, we let this page's own Hint button play 1,000 random deals under each rule set, always taking the move it suggests and never undoing. The hints follow simple rules and never look ahead, so a careful player should do better:

Draw 3 with unlimited passes (10%) is far harder than Draw 1 (42%), and limiting the passes makes both much harder again.

A short history

Klondike is a traditional patience game; in Britain, games of solitaire are called patience. Where its name comes from isn't known. It is often linked with the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon in the late 1890s, but there is no firm evidence for that. Rules for the game as it is played today appear in American rule books of the early 1900s, including a 1907 edition of Hoyle's Games, where it is called Seven-Card Klondike.

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