Klondike

What is Klondike Solitaire?

Klondike is the variant most people just call "Solitaire", the one that shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990 and taught a generation how to use a mouse. The goal is to move all 52 cards onto four foundation piles, one per suit, built upward from Ace to King.

You start with 28 cards dealt face-down into seven columns, the top card of each turned face-up. That's the tableau. The other 24 make up the stock pile you draw from when the tableau stops offering you anything.

A brief history

The name probably comes from the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–1899, though the game's own origin is genuinely disputed. Patience games of much the same design turn up in European card-game literature decades earlier.

The Windows version was written by Wes Cherry, a Microsoft intern, as a way to get office workers comfortable with a mouse. It became one of the most-played computer games in history entirely by accident, and the rules have barely moved since.

Core strategy

Expose hidden cards as fast as you can. That's the whole thing. Every face-down card in the tableau is a card you can't plan around, so a move that flips a new one beats a move that just shuffles visible cards between columns.

The counterintuitive bit: when you can either send a card to the foundation or leave it in the tableau to uncover something, leaving it is often right. A card on the foundation can't come back in most rulesets, and pulling it up too early strands the cards that needed it.

Empty columns are powerful. Only a King can fill one, which makes it a free staging area for reorganising sequences, and clearing one early is usually worth a few sacrificed points for the flexibility. Be careful with the stock, too. Once you've cycled through it, a game can quietly become unwinnable with key cards buried and nothing left to move.

Scoring and time

Standard scoring: ten points for each card moved to a foundation, five for flipping a face-down card, five for playing a card off the waste, and nothing for shuffling cards between columns. Hints are unlimited and each one costs a single point — just enough that when two players finish the same deal, the one who found the moves unaided ranks first. The daily deal resets at midnight and records your score, time and move count against your personal bests.

Only completed games update your streak. Walking away from an unfinished one won't break it, but it won't extend it either. All of this stays in your browser and never leaves your device.

One deal a day

One seeded shuffle a day, so everyone who visits that day faces the same arrangement. Your first game against it is the one that counts, and finishing it extends your streak and records your score, time and moves. After that the play button keeps dealing fresh random shuffles, as many hands as you like, none of them touching your record.

Tips for beginners

Starting out, worry about exactly one thing: uncovering face-down cards. Everything else can wait. Resist sending Aces straight to the foundation if doing it leaves useful cards stuck underneath something.

Watch the suits, too. Putting a red seven on a black eight can block a black seven from ever finding a red eight, if the other red eights are buried. Think two or three moves out before you commit. Eventually you get a feel for which deals are still alive and which ones went cold ten moves ago, and the completion rate climbs on its own.

All of that at length, plus the full rules, in Klondike Solitaire Rules: How to Play, and the Habits That Win More Deals.