How to Play Klondike Solitaire

The setup

You need a single standard 52-card deck — no jokers. At the start of a deal, seven tableau piles are laid out from left to right. The leftmost pile gets one card; each pile to the right gets one more than the previous, so the rightmost pile has seven cards. Only the top card of each pile is turned face up; everything underneath starts hidden.

That uses 28 cards. The remaining 24 are set aside face down as the stock, ready to be drawn from one at a time (or three at a time, depending on your settings). Four empty spaces sit above the tableau — these are the foundations, one for each suit, and they start the game completely bare.

The foundations

Each foundation is built up in suit from Ace to King. The Ace of Spades goes on the Spades foundation, then the Two of Spades, then the Three, and so on up to the King. All four suits follow the same pattern independently of each other, so the order you complete them in does not matter.

The goal of the game is to move all 52 cards onto the foundations. If you get every card there, you win.

The tableau

Most of the action happens on the seven tableau piles. Any face-up card on a tableau pile can be moved to another tableau pile, provided it goes onto a card that is one rank higher and the opposite colour. A black Eight can sit on a red Nine; a red Queen can sit on a black King. These ordered runs of alternating colour move as a unit — if you pick up the Eight with a Seven beneath it, both cards travel together.

Whenever a move uncovers the top face-down card of a pile, that card flips over and becomes available to play. This is how you dig through the hidden cards and open up new options.

If an entire column is cleared, only a King — or a sequence headed by a King — can fill it. Empty columns are valuable, so clearing one deliberately is often a useful intermediate goal.

The stock and waste

When there are no useful moves on the tableau, draw from the stock. The drawn card lands face up on the waste pile and is immediately available to move to the tableau or directly to a foundation if it fits. Only the top card of the waste is accessible at any time.

Once the stock runs out, you can turn the waste pile over and run through it again. Our app allows unlimited redeals by default, which is the most common modern convention and keeps the game from getting stuck purely on bad luck.

Draw One and Draw Three are two different modes that change the feel of the game considerably. Draw One lets you flip through the stock one card at a time, giving you full access to every card in a few passes. Draw Three deals three cards at once to the waste, with only the top one playable — you see less of the deck per pass, which makes the game harder. The Draw One vs Draw Three article goes into the trade-offs in more detail if you are deciding which to use.

Winning

The game is won the moment all 52 cards are on the foundations — four complete suit sequences, Ace through King. There is no partial win. If you reach a state where no moves remain and the stock is exhausted, the deal is unwinnable and you start a fresh one.

A note on variants

Klondike goes by several names depending on where you grew up. In the UK it is often called Patience; in much of continental Europe, various local spellings of the same word. Historically it was also known as Fascination and Demon Patience, among others. Today, when someone says "Solitaire" without any qualifier — on a phone, in a search engine, on a game site — they almost certainly mean Klondike. The form that shipped inside Windows for decades is the same game described on this page, and it is what our app implements.

If you want to move beyond the basics, the Klondike Strategy Fundamentals article covers the decisions that separate a thoughtful player from someone who just moves cards around. Or skip straight to the game — play now.