Klondike Solitaire

The game behind the word “solitaire”

Klondike is the patience game that thirty years of desktop computers turned into the default meaning of solitaire. The name is older than the software — it comes from the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, when the game spread through prospector camps in the Yukon — but it was the version bundled with every office PC that made its layout universal.

If someone hands you a deck and says “deal a game of solitaire”, this is the game they mean: seven columns, four foundations, one stock, and a great many hidden cards.

How a Klondike deal is laid out

Cards go out left to right in seven columns of increasing size: one card in the first column, two in the second, up to seven in the last. Only the final card of each column is turned face up, which leaves twenty-one cards hidden. The remaining twenty-four become the stock.

That distribution matters more than it looks. Column one hides nothing; column seven hides six cards. Sixteen of the twenty-one unknown cards sit in the four deepest columns, so the right-hand side of the table is where the game is won or lost.

• ✓Build the four foundations up from Ace to King, one suit each.
• ✓Columns build downwards in alternating colours.
• ✓Only a King, or a run headed by one, may fill an empty column.
• ✓Turn the stock as often as you like — the waste recycles.

Why the layout works the way it does

The alternating-colour rule is what makes digging hard. A black Eight can only sit on a red Nine, so each buried card has exactly two possible parents in the whole deck — and if both of those are themselves buried, the stock is your only way in.

Good Klondike play is largely the discipline of not spending those parent slots carelessly. Every time you place a card, you consume one of the two homes some other card was going to need.

Digging: the skill that decides Klondike

1. 01

   Attack the deepest column first

   The column with the most face-down cards is the one most likely to be hiding the card that unlocks everything else. Shallow columns are cheap to fix later; deep ones only get harder as the game narrows.

2. 02

   Count a King before you clear a space

   Emptying a column is a large investment of moves. If no King is exposed or reachable when the space appears, you have spent that investment on a gap that helps nobody.

3. 03

   Break a built run when it buys a flip

   Players grow attached to sequences they assembled. A tidy five-card run that sits on top of two unknown cards is worth less than the same cards scattered with those two revealed — the run can be rebuilt, the information cannot be invented.

4. 04

   Hold a duplicate colour back

   When both black Sevens are available for a red Eight, placing one keeps the other in reserve for the next red Eight to appear. Placing both onto the same colour early is how players run out of legal moves with a board that looks healthy.

What this table does differently

Deals here are not raw shuffles. A solver plays each candidate to completion first, and only shuffles with a proven winning line are dealt — the toolbar's Verified badge links to that proof, including the move count. Across the current pool those lines run 127 to 172 moves, so a typical win asks for about a hundred and fifty decisions.

Undo is unlimited, Restart re-deals the identical shuffle when you want a second attempt at the same puzzle, and a dead end offers a rewind to the last winnable point in your own history. For the harder traditional draw, Turn 3 deals three cards at a time; Yukon keeps the Klondike look but removes the stock entirely.

Questions about this game

Why is it called Klondike solitaire?

The name comes from the Klondike region of the Yukon, where the game is thought to have spread through mining camps during the 1890s gold rush. In much of the world the same game is simply called solitaire or patience; Klondike is the precise name for this seven-column layout.

What fraction of Klondike deals can be won?

Computer analyses put the theoretical figure for turn-one Klondike at roughly four deals in five, assuming perfect play and knowledge of the hidden cards. It does not apply here, though: this site only deals shuffles its solver has already won, so the practical answer is all of them.

Is Klondike a game of skill or luck?

Both, in sequence. The shuffle decides what is possible; your ordering of flips, digs and foundation moves decides whether the possible actually happens. Verified deals settle the luck half in your favour before you start, which leaves only the skill half.

Should I always play an Ace to the foundation?

Usually yes for Aces, since they block a column and can receive nothing. Twos and Threes are different — they can still accept a card on the tableau, and sending them up too early is one of the most common ways a promising board runs dry.