Klondike Solitaire Rules

Klondike is the solitaire game most people simply call "Solitaire" — the default deal on essentially every computer that's ever shipped one — and its familiar seven-column layout is the template most other single-player card games on this site are explicitly compared against.

The deal

A standard 52-card deck is dealt into seven tableau columns: the first column gets one card, the second gets two, and so on up to the seventh column's seven cards, with only the top card of each column dealt face-up and every card beneath it face-down. The remaining 24 cards form the face-down stock pile.

Building in the tableau

Every tableau column runs downward, alternating red and black as it goes — a red queen sitting on a black king is a legal continuation, a red queen on a red king is not. Whenever a face-down card becomes the topmost card of its column (because the cards above it have all been played elsewhere), it's flipped face-up and becomes available for play. An empty column, once fully cleared, can only be filled by a king (or a king-headed sequence of cards) moved there from elsewhere.

Drawing from the stock

Cards not yet in the tableau are drawn from the stock pile, turned face-up one at a time onto a waste pile beside it (or three at a time in the harder "draw three" variant, where only the topmost of the three showing cards is playable at any moment). Once the stock is exhausted, it's commonly allowed to be reshuffled and reused, though some strict rule sets allow only a single pass through the stock before it's dead.

The foundations

The four suits each get their own pile, started with an ace and stacked upward in strict rank order toward the king. The top card of a tableau column, or whatever's currently showing on the waste pile, moves across the moment it's the exact rank a foundation is waiting for — nothing else qualifies.

Winning

A finished deal has every card sitting on its foundation, ace through king, four separate suits complete. Getting there is genuinely not guaranteed the way it is in FreeCell — several tableau cards start hidden face-down, and the stock pile keeps revealing new information as it's drawn through, so some Klondike deals are provably unsolvable no matter how skillfully they're played.

Draw-one versus draw-three

The single biggest rule variation in Klondike is how many stock cards are turned over at once. Draw-one is considerably easier and is the version most casual and digital versions default to; draw-three is meaningfully harder, since two out of every three stock cards stay effectively buried beneath the one currently playable, and it's the version most competitive and "official" Klondike scoring rules assume when awarding a higher point value for a win.

Strategy: uncovering hidden cards over chasing the foundations

Because every tableau column hides face-down cards beneath its visible top card, the strongest general strategy is prioritizing moves that reveal a new face-down card over moves that simply shuffle already-visible cards around — sending a card to the foundation the instant it's available can sometimes strand a card beneath it that was about to reveal a hidden card, so experienced players often hold a foundation-eligible card back briefly if playing it elsewhere first would uncover more of the hidden tableau.

Origins: named for the Klondike Gold Rush

Klondike's exact origin and inventor aren't documented with certainty — like most classic solitaire games, it developed as a folk card pastime rather than a published, authored ruleset — but its name is widely tied to the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, a period when the game is believed to have become especially popular among prospectors with long stretches of solitary downtime. It became the default solitaire game bundled with Microsoft Windows starting in 1990, which is almost certainly why it's the specific solitaire variant most people worldwide picture first when they hear the word "solitaire" at all.

Vegas-style scoring

A well-known scoring variant, sometimes called "Vegas Klondike," assigns a real cash value to each card sent to the foundation and treats an unplayed deal as a fixed loss, purely to give the single-player game a stakes-based framing similar to a casino game rather than a simple win-or-lose outcome. It changes nothing about how cards are actually moved — only how a finished (or abandoned) deal gets valued at the end.

Questions that come up mid-game

Can a card be moved from the foundation back down into the tableau if it turns out to be needed there? Most rule sets allow this — foundation cards aren't strictly locked in place, though it's a fairly rare and situational move compared to the far more common tableau-to-tableau and tableau-to-foundation plays.

Is reshuffling the stock pile once it's exhausted always allowed? It depends on the specific rule set — casual and most digital versions allow unlimited passes through the stock, while stricter "official" scoring rules cap it at one or three total passes, which is worth checking if you're comparing win rates against a specific scoring standard.