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How to Play Solitaire

A beginner's guide to Klondike solitaire: every pile named, every legal move explained, and the exact rules the free game on this site plays by.

Rules checked against the engine that runs the board on .

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How to play Solitaire, step by step

The Klondike table, labelled: stock, waste, foundations, tableau.Stock?Waste7♦Foundations♠♥♦♣TableauA♠9♥K♣4♦Q♠2♥J♣
The four parts of the table: the stock you turn from, the waste it turns onto, the four foundations you are building, and the seven columns of the tableau. A dashed box is an empty space.

  1. Find the four parts of the table

    Klondike solitaire is dealt from one 52-card pack into four areas, and knowing their names makes every other instruction readable. The seven columns of cards across the middle are the tableau, where most of the play happens. The four empty spaces at the top right are the foundations, and filling them is how you win. The face-down pile at the top left is the stock, and the space next to it, where cards from the stock are turned face up one at a time, is the waste.

  2. Read the layout before you touch anything

    The first tableau column holds one card, the second two, and so on up to seven in the last column: twenty-eight cards in all, with only the bottom card of each column face up. Everything above that card is face down and unknown until the cards covering it are moved away. The remaining twenty-four cards stay in the stock. Cards rank Ace low, then 2 to 10, Jack, Queen, King. Hearts and diamonds are red; spades and clubs are black.

  3. Know what winning looks like

    You win Klondike by getting all fifty-two cards onto the four foundations. Each foundation holds one suit and is built upwards in order from the Ace: Ace, 2, 3, and so on through Jack, Queen and King, all of the same suit. An empty foundation accepts nothing but an Ace. Everything you do down in the columns is really about freeing the cards these four piles need next, in the order they need them.

  4. Send an Ace to a foundation

    Look along the face-up card at the bottom of each of the seven columns for an Ace, and move it up to an empty foundation space. On this site you can drag the card, or tap the card and then tap the foundation, or double-click the card and it will find its own way. That is a completed first move. If no Ace is showing yet, leave the foundations empty and start with the columns instead.

  5. Build the columns downward in alternating colours

    A card may be placed on the bottom card of another column only if it is exactly one rank lower and the opposite colour: a red six onto a black seven, a black jack onto a red queen. Two cards of the same colour never stack on each other in the tableau, and the ranks must be consecutive. Moving a card away uncovers whatever was beneath it, and if that card was face down it turns face up at once, which is how you open up the hidden part of the tableau.

  6. Turn the stock when the columns are stuck

    Click or tap the face-down stock pile at the top left and its top card is turned face up onto the waste beside it. Only that one visible waste card can be played, either onto a column that will take it or onto a foundation. Keep turning to work through the pack. When the stock is empty, clicking the empty space puts the whole waste back underneath in the same order so you can go through it again.

  7. Put a King into an empty column

    If you manage to clear every card out of a tableau column, the space that is left will accept a King and nothing else. That is the Klondike rule that makes an empty column valuable, and occasionally a trap if you have no King to put in it. A King moved across usually brings a queen, a jack and a run of cards after it over the next few moves, and it is often the only way to reach the last face-down cards.

Play Solitaire That is enough to start. The rest of this page is the reference.

The rules in full

Everything the Solitaire lesson above skipped: the edge cases, what happens when you run out of moves, how the game ends and how it is scored. 8 sections, written to be looked things up in rather than read straight through — the contents at the top of the page jump to any of them.

The words on the table

Every solitaire instruction ever written assumes you already know these eight words. They take two minutes, and the rest of this page leans on them.

Pile
Any stack of cards on the table. A pile can be face up, face down, or a mixture of the two.
Tableau
The seven columns in the middle of the table, and the working area of the game. One column is one pile.
Foundation
One of the four piles at the top right that you are building up, Ace to King, one suit each. Filling all four is the win.
Stock
The face-down pile of cards left over after the deal — twenty-four of them — that you turn over when the tableau is stuck.
Waste
The face-up pile beside the stock, where turned cards land. Only its top card is in play. Some books call it the talon.
Run
Two or more face-up cards already in descending, alternating-colour order — nine of hearts, eight of clubs, seven of diamonds. A run can be picked up and carried as one piece.
Build
To place a card on another card legally. You build down in the tableau and up on the foundations.
Void
A tableau column with no cards left in it at all. In Klondike a void accepts a King and nothing else.

The deal

One standard 52-card pack, no jokers. Twenty-eight cards go out into seven columns — one card in the first column, two in the second, up to seven in the seventh — and the last card dealt to each column is turned face up. Every card underneath it is face down. The remaining twenty-four cards become the stock, and the four foundation spaces start empty.

That is the whole setup, and it is the same every time. What changes between deals is the order of the pack, which is why two games of Klondike can feel nothing alike.

There are only six kinds of move in the game, and the board will refuse anything that is not one of them.

  • A face-up card onto a foundation. An empty foundation takes an Ace only. After that a foundation takes the next rank up in its own suit: the two of hearts onto the ace of hearts, then the three of hearts, and so on.
  • A face-up card onto another column. Legal only if the card is one rank lower than the card it lands on and the opposite colour. Red on black, black on red, always going down: queen, jack, ten, nine.
  • A run onto another column. The same rule, applied to the top card of the run. The whole run travels together, however long it is, as long as every card in it is face up and in descending alternating-colour order.
  • The top card of the waste onto a column or a foundation. The waste’s top card behaves exactly like a card at the bottom of a column. The cards under it are out of play until it moves.
  • A card off a foundation and back into the tableau. Legal, occasionally necessary, and it costs you 15 points.
  • A King, or a run headed by a King, into a void. Nothing else may start an empty column.

Two things are not moves. You cannot place a card on a face-down card, and you cannot take a card from the middle of a column — only a run that reaches the bottom of it. When a move leaves a face-down card exposed at the bottom of a column, it turns face up immediately and without being asked.

Turning the stock

Clicking the stock turns its top card face up onto the waste. This game is dealt turn 1, so that is one card per click and every card in the pack can be reached; the sister page, Klondike Turn 3, turns three at a time and lets you play only the top one of the three.

When the stock is empty and the waste is not, clicking the empty stock space puts the waste back under it, face down, in the same order it came out. You may do that as many times as you like — this game does not limit the number of passes through the pack — but at turn 1 each pass costs 100 points, which is the standard Windows rule and the reason the score is not simply a count of how long you sat there. At turn 3, passes are free.

How the score works

The number under the board is the Windows Klondike scoring table, unchanged:

  • 10 points for a card moved to a foundation, from anywhere.
  • 5 points for a card moved from the waste into the tableau.
  • 5 points for turning a face-down tableau card face up.
  • Minus 15 for taking a card back off a foundation.
  • Minus 100 for each pass through the pack at turn 1. Nothing at turn 3.

The score never drops below zero. There is no bonus for finishing quickly and no points for time remaining, because inventing extra scoring would make our number mean something different from the one people know. The clock beside it is a plain timer. Three records are kept for each setting — best score, fastest win and fewest moves — and a time or a move count is only filed for a game you actually won. Deals vetted as winnable and deals straight off the pack are counted apart, because a best set on a board a solver had already finished is not the same achievement.

How a game ends

You win the moment all fifty-two cards are on the foundations. Once the stock and waste are empty and every card in the tableau is face up, the outcome is settled — nothing can go wrong from there — so a Finish button appears and runs the remaining cards home for you, with the cascade at the end.

A loss is quieter. Klondike has no mechanism for declaring one, so the game tells you when there is genuinely nothing left to do: no legal move on the table, and no card still in the stock or waste that would have a home if it came to the top. Until then the position is alive, and the honest answer to “am I stuck?” is usually the Hint button, which lights one move — the best one it can find, which is not the same as the first legal one: it would rather show you a move that turns a face-down card over than a three that could go on a four. Undo steps back through the last thousand moves, one at a time; if you close the tab and come back, the deal is restored with the last thirty of them.

Where this game makes a choice

Klondike has been published in a dozen slightly different forms, so here is exactly what this one does, in the places where implementations disagree.

  • Unlimited passes through the pack, with the 100-point penalty at turn 1. Some versions allow three passes, or one. Ours allows as many as you like and charges for them.
  • Any valid run moves as one piece, at any length. Some computer versions make you move cards one at a time; that is a restriction from FreeCell, where it belongs, and it is not in the Klondike rules.
  • Foundation to tableau is allowed. Several versions lock a card away permanently once it is on a foundation. Ours does not, and charges the standard 15 points.
  • Deals can be vetted. Set Deals to Winnable and, before dealing, a solver plays the board out to check there is a win in it. It gets a few hundred milliseconds; if nothing solves in that time the game says so plainly and deals an ordinary hand rather than making you wait. The Daily deal is never vetted — it is the same board for everybody, winnable or not.
  • Hints can be turned off. By default, lifting a card rings every pile it may legally go to, which is help a first-time player wants and an experienced one does not. The Hints control switches the rings off and remembers the choice.
  • The cards can be made larger. Four sizes, up to extra large for big print, and seven table surfaces including the green felt, because a card you cannot read is not a card you can play.

Where these rules come from

The rules on this page are the standard game as recorded on Pagat, John McLeod’s card-game rules archive, and every one of them was checked against the code that runs the board — the tableau, foundation and run rules in our solitaire engine’s rules.ts, the stock and scoring in its game.ts — rather than written from memory. If you find a rule here that the game does not follow, that is a bug in one of the two and we would like to know: tell us and it gets a test written for it so it cannot come back.

Questions people ask

Can every game of solitaire be won?
No. Some Klondike deals cannot be won however well you play, and our own solver — which, unlike you, can see the face-down cards — proves it outright on a small share of the deals we hand it. We do not publish a win percentage, because on many deals the solver runs out of search budget without an answer either way, and a number we cannot stand behind is not worth printing. If you would rather not meet a dead deal, set Deals to Winnable: every new game is then one the solver has already finished.
What is the difference between turn 1 and turn 3?
How many cards the stock turns over at a time. Turn 1 shows you one card per click, so every card in the pack is reachable and most deals are open to a careful player. Turn 3 turns three cards at once and only the top one can be played, so two cards in every three are hidden behind another until the pack comes round again. Turn 3 is the traditional scoring game and is considerably harder. Both are on this site, as Solitaire and as Klondike Turn 3, and each keeps its own record.
Can I take a card back off a foundation?
Yes. A card on a foundation can be moved back down into the tableau if it fits there — one rank lower than the card it lands on and the opposite colour — and sometimes that is the only way to keep going. It costs 15 points in the score, which is the standard penalty, and it is not available once a card is buried under a higher one of its suit. There is also undo, which steps back through the last thousand moves and is the gentler way to change your mind.
What can go into an empty tableau column?
In Klondike, only a King, or a run of cards with a King at its head. That is a real rule rather than a restriction we added, and it is the main reason emptying a column is not always the win it looks like. Other games in the family are more generous: FreeCell and Spider both let any card start an empty column, which is part of why an empty column is so powerful in those games.
Can I move more than one card at a time?
Yes, as long as the cards you are lifting already form a proper run — every card face up, each one a rank lower than the one above it and the opposite colour. Pick up the highest card of the run and the rest follow. There is no limit on the length in Klondike, so a seven-card run moves as easily as a pair, provided the column you are moving it onto will accept the card at its head.
Is Klondike the same thing as solitaire or patience?
Near enough. Solitaire means any card game for one player, and in Britain the same games are called patience — but when somebody says solitaire they almost always mean Klondike, the seven-column game Windows shipped in 1990. Everything on this page is Klondike. Spider, FreeCell and Pyramid are different games in the same family, with their own guides.

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