How to Play

The goal

Move all 52 cards onto the four foundations in the top right, one per suit, built up from Ace to King.
The seven tableau piles below are built down in alternating colours — a red 7 goes on a black 8.
Only a King (or a run headed by one) may move into an empty tableau pile.
A face-down card turns over as soon as it becomes the top of its pile.
Click the stock in the top left to turn cards over; click it again when empty to recycle them.

Controls

Drag a card — or a whole run of cards — onto the pile you want it on.
Or tap to pick up and tap again on the destination. Both work on desktop and on a phone.
Double-click or double-tap a card to send it straight to its foundation.
Undo takes back any number of moves, right to the start of the deal.
Hint picks out the most useful move available — 3 per game.
Finish lights up once every card is face up and plays the rest out for you.

The three modes

Draw 1 — one card off the stock at a time, unlimited passes. Most deals can be won.
Draw 3 — the classic game: three cards at a time, so only every third card is reachable.
Hard — draw three with only three passes through the stock. Once they are gone, what is left on the table is all you have.

A fair warning

Unlike the other puzzles on this site, not every Klondike deal can be won — the cards are shuffled honestly and some arrangements are hopeless from the start.
That is why Undo is unlimited here: a lost deal is usually worth replaying rather than restarting.

History of Solitaire

Patience games appear in European card books from the late 18th century, first in Germany and Scandinavia. They were often played as a kind of fortune telling — whether the cards came out told you whether your wish would be granted.

Klondike takes its name from the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s, where prospectors are said to have played it through the long Yukon winters. It was already common in American card books by 1900, and it is the game most English speakers simply call solitaire.

Its second life began in 1990, when Microsoft shipped Solitaire with Windows 3.0 — not as a toy, but to teach a generation of office workers how to use a mouse: click, drag, release. It became the most-played computer game in history, and taught drag and drop to more people than any tutorial ever written.

Tips & Fun Facts

Strategy

Turn over face-down cards first. Every hidden card is a card you cannot plan around — prefer the move that reveals one.
Empty a column early. Columns with few hidden cards are the ones to dig out; an empty pile is the most useful space on the table.
Do not rush to the foundations. A 5 sent home too early may be exactly what a 4 needed to land on.
Play the stock before you are stuck, not after — in Draw 3 the order of the waste only changes when you cycle it.
Hold a King back until you know which colour you need, if you have more than one place to put it.
With two equal choices, take the one from the bigger hidden pile.

Did you know?

Around 79% of Klondike deals are winnable with perfect play and full knowledge of the cards — but a human playing blind wins far fewer.
The exact proportion was unknown for decades; it is still called the "solitaire problem" in computer science literature.
A deck can be shuffled into 52! arrangements — about 8×10⁶⁷, more than there are atoms in our galaxy.
Microsoft's version was written by an intern, Wes Cherry, who was never paid for it. The card artwork was designed by Susan Kare.