How to Play Klondike Solitaire
Klondike is the game almost everyone means when they say "Solitaire". Seven tableau columns are dealt, each with one face-up card on top and a growing number of face-down cards beneath. Above them sit four empty foundation piles. The rest of the deck forms the stock, which you draw from.
Your goal is to move all 52 cards onto the foundations, each built up from ace to king in a single suit.
The rules
- Foundations build up by suit: ace, two, three, and so on to king
- Tableau columns build down in alternating colours — a red seven goes on a black eight
- Only a king may be placed into an empty column
- Drawing from the stock cycles cards to the waste pile, where the top card is playable
Controls
Tap a card to select it, then tap the destination to move it. Tap the stock to draw. Double-tap any card to auto-move it — foundation first, then any legal tableau spot. Undo is unlimited.
The face-down cards are the actual game
Klondike looks like it is about the foundations. It is not. It is about the face-down cards in the tableau, which are the only unknown information on the board. Every card you reveal expands your options; every turn you spend not revealing one leaves you playing with less information than you could have had.
This gives you a simple priority rule that will improve most players' win rate immediately: when choosing between two legal moves, take the one that flips a face-down card. If neither does, take the one that creates the possibility of flipping one soon.
Uncover the longest column first
Face-down cards are not equal. A column with five hidden cards is holding five unknowns hostage; a column with one is holding one. Early in the game, direct your effort at the longest face-down stacks, because they gate the most of the deck.
It often feels slower — you will make several moves that produce no visible progress — but it opens the board far more effectively than picking off the easy short columns first.
Do not rush the foundations
The most common losing habit in Klondike is sending every eligible card to the foundation the moment it becomes legal. Aces and twos should always go up; they can never be useful below. But a six sent to the foundation is a six that is no longer available to hold a red five on the tableau, and that missing link can lock a column permanently.
A good general principle: send a card up only when both cards of that rank in the opposite colour are also safely up, or when you can see that you will not need it.
Empty columns are valuable — and only for kings
An empty tableau column is one of the strongest positions in the game, because it can receive a king and start a whole new descending run. But it can only receive a king. Emptying a column when no king is available to fill it wastes the opportunity, and an empty column sitting idle does nothing for you.
Before you clear a column, check that a king is actually reachable.
Use the undo
There is no penalty for undoing, which means undo is a planning tool rather than a mistake-correction tool. If you are unsure whether to send a card to the foundation, send it, look at what happens to the board, and reverse it if it was wrong. Exploring a line and backing out is exactly how strong players handle ambiguous positions.
Not every deal is winnable
Roughly 80 percent of Klondike deals are theoretically solvable with perfect play and full knowledge. Because the face-down cards are hidden, the realistically achievable rate is lower — typically around 40 to 50 percent for experienced players drawing three cards at a time, and higher with single-card draws. A lost game is often genuinely unwinnable rather than misplayed, which is worth remembering before you blame yourself.
Why everyone has played this
Klondike shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990 and became, by some measures, the most-played computer game in history — included free on hundreds of millions of machines at a time when almost nothing else was. Like Minesweeper, it was partly there to teach mouse skills, specifically drag-and-drop.
Plays on any device
Klondike Solitaire runs in your browser with HTML5 and works on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Nothing to install, no account, no signup.
