Golf: the solitaire where a low score wins
Most solitaires ask whether you can win. Golf asks how well you lost. The board is a seven-column spread of thirty-five face-up cards, and your only move is brutally simple: send an exposed card to the waste pile if it's exactly one rank above or below the card on top. When you run out of plays you flip a new card from the stock — but the stock holds just seventeen cards, and when it's gone, the round is over. Every card still stranded on the table is a stroke against you, exactly like strokes in the game it's named after. Clearing the whole course happens, but it's rare enough to feel like a hole-in-one; the real game is shaving your average down, round after round.
Where Golf comes from
Golf has been appearing in patience collections since the early twentieth century, sometimes under the older name One Foundation — an apt description, since the entire game funnels into a single discard pile. The golf theme stuck because the scoring maps onto the sport so naturally: each deal is a "hole," each stranded card a stroke, and devotees traditionally play nine deals in a row as a full round, tallying strokes across all nine. That built-in match structure is rare among solitaires and is a big part of why Golf survived the jump to computers so well — it's fast, it's swingy, and there's always a next hole. It remains a staple of digital solitaire collections, where its two-minute deals make it one of the most replayed patience games ever made.
The objective
Move as many of the thirty-five tableau cards as possible onto the waste pile before the stock runs out. Your score is the number of cards left on the table — lower is better, and zero (clearing the course) is the dream. In the traditional scoring this board uses, clearing the tableau with cards still in the stock counts one under par for each unflipped stock card, so a fast clear can even go negative.
Plenty of Golf deals cannot be cleared at all, however perfectly you play — a deep-buried Ace whose only 2s are buried elsewhere can be stranded from the moment the cards land. That is precisely why the game counts strokes rather than wins and losses. The skill isn't in clearing every deal; it's in leaving three cards where a careless player leaves nine.
- Cards on the course
- 35
- Seven columns of five, every one face up from the start.
- Flips, and no more
- 17
- The stock never recycles. Each flip is a resource you spend, not a reset.
- Par for a nine-hole round
- 36
- Four strokes a deal. Average under that and you are playing genuinely well.
Setup
- The tableau is seven columns of five cards each, dealt from a single 52-card deck, every card face up. Only the bottom card of each column — the one nothing overlaps — is in play at any moment.
- The stock holds the remaining seventeen cards, face down. Flipping its top card onto the waste is how every round starts, and how you restart the action whenever the table goes quiet.
- The waste pile begins empty and grows one card at a time. Only its top card matters — there is no digging back down.
How a turn works
- Play any exposed card one rank away from the waste top. Rank is all that matters — suit and color are completely ignored. If the waste shows a 7, any exposed 6 or 8 can go, and then the chain continues from whatever you played: 7, 8, 9, 8, 7, 6…
- Chains are where scores are made. One flip from the stock can unload five, six, seven cards if the table cooperates. Long chains are the whole game; single plays are consolation prizes.
- Rank is a line, not a loop. Under classic rules the sequence has hard ends: an Ace connects only to a 2, and a King on the waste kills the pile — no card can follow it, not even a Queen, until you flip a fresh stock card. Neither is a bug, and both catch people out constantly. The around-the-corner toggle above bends the line into a circle so King, Ace and 2 all connect; the name comes from the rank sequence turning the corner past its own ends.
- Flip from the stock when you're out of plays — or when you choose to be. Flipping is always legal, but each of the seventeen flips is a resource: a flip you spend while playable cards are still on the table is usually a flip wasted.
- The round ends when the tableau is empty (you cleared the course) or when the stock is empty and no exposed card can play.
Scoring, the golf way
Each card left in the tableau at the end of a deal scores one stroke. Clearing the tableau scores zero, minus one for every card still in the stock — finish a hole with three flips unspent and you're three under. Traditionalists play a nine-hole round: nine consecutive deals, strokes totalled across all of them, treating four strokes per hole (36 for the round) as par. It's a wonderfully honest format because no single deal decides anything — a disaster hole just means you're grinding to make it back on the next one.
| Hole | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Par | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 36 |
| Strokes | 2 | 7 | 0 | 5 | 3 | −2 | 9 | 1 | 4 | 29 |
| To par | −2 | +3 | −4 | +1 | −1 | −6 | +5 | −3 | 0 | −7 |
If you keep a running average below four cards per deal you're playing genuinely well; full clears under classic rules are an occasional treat rather than a target. Around-the-corner is far more forgiving, so keep separate personal bests for the two modes — comparing them is comparing different courses.
Common variations
Golf's house rules mostly argue about the ends of the sequence.Around the corner (playable here with the toggle) makes rank continuous — King, Ace, Two connect in both directions — which roughly doubles your chain options and makes clears dramatically more common; treat your scores in the two modes as separate records. Some households play live Kings as a halfway house: Queens may play on Kings, but Ace still won't wrap. Double Golf deals two decks into nine columns of seven for a longer, swingier game. And a few versions score Kings as double strokes at the end, punishing the cards that are hardest to shed. This page's classic mode plays the strict traditional rules: dead Kings, no wrap, one deck.
Strategy that actually matters
- Survey before you flip. The whole tableau is face up — Golf is a perfect-information puzzle between flips. Before spending a stock card, trace every chain the current waste card offers and pick the longest one. The most common beginner mistake is flipping the instant the obvious plays run out.
- When a chain forks, look two moves ahead. If the waste shows a 7 and you have two 8s exposed, the right 8 is the one whose column reveals another connector — an 8 hiding a 9 keeps the chain alive, an 8 hiding a 3 ends it. Every play is also a reveal; choose plays for what they uncover, not just what they remove.
- Count to four. There are exactly four of each rank. If you've seen all four 6s go by, the 5s and 7s can only reach each other through the stock — that changes which chains are worth chasing. You don't need to track everything; just note when a rank you depend on is exhausted.
- Dig out Kings early, and mind what buries them. In classic rules a King can never leave via another card — it only exits when you play it onto a Queen from the waste. A King at the bottom of a column with four cards on top is four strokes threatening to become five. Prioritize columns with deep Kings and Aces; they're the cards most likely to strand.
- Keep columns balanced when chains are equal. A tall column hides more cards from play than a short one, so all else equal, take cards from the tallest columns. An empty column costs you nothing in Golf — there's nothing to move into it — but a six-card tower can lock away a fifth of your outs.
- Late in the stock, play defense. With three flips left, a two-card chain that sheds an awkward Ace beats a three-card chain of easy middle cards. Middle ranks (5 through 9) connect to almost anything and can wait; the edges of the sequence can't.