Solitaire

Klondike: the solitaire everyone means when they say "Solitaire"

When someone says "deal me a game of Solitaire" without naming a variant, they almost always mean Klondike. It's the version that shipped free with every copy of Windows starting in 1990, which makes it a strong candidate for the single most-played card game in human history — more hands of Klondike have probably been dealt on office computers than hands of poker have been dealt anywhere.

Where the name comes from

Nobody kept a tidy paper trail for a card game invented by bored people passing time, so Klondike's exact origin is genuinely unclear. The most common story ties the name to the Klondike region of Canada's Yukon Territory, dealt out by prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s — plausible, since patience games (the umbrella term for all solitaire card games) were already popular parlor entertainment by then, and a long, isolated winter is exactly the kind of place a card game spreads. What's well documented is Klondike's second life: Microsoft bundled it with Windows 3.0 specifically so a generation of new PC users would practice dragging and clicking a mouse without realizing they were being trained. It worked — Solitaire quietly became the reason a huge number of people first got comfortable using a mouse at all.

The objective

Move all 52 cards onto four foundation piles, one per suit, built up in order from Ace to King. Whether you can win a given deal at all sometimes depends on decisions made ten moves earlier, which is what keeps the game interesting well past the ten-thousandth play.

Setup

• The tableau is seven columns. Column 1 gets one card, column 2 gets two, up through column 7 with seven cards. Only the top card of each column starts face up; everything underneath is face down.
• The stock is whatever's left — 24 cards — placed face down as your draw pile.
• The foundations start empty, one reserved for each suit.

How a turn works

You've got three moves available at any moment:

1. Draw from the stock into the waste pile, turning the top card (or top three, in Draw Three) face up.
2. Build the tableau by placing a card on a column where it's one rank lower than the top card and the opposite color — a black 7 goes on a red 8, a red Jack goes on a black Queen. You can move a whole run of cards at once, as long as that run is itself a valid alternating sequence. An empty column is the one exception to the rule: only a King (or a King with cards stacked on it) can start a new pile there.
3. Send a card to its foundation once it's the next rank up in that suit — Aces first, then 2 through King in order.

When the stock runs out, it doesn't end the game — clicking the empty stock flips the waste back over and gives you the deck again, in the same order, to draw through a second time (and a third, and so on). So running dry on the tableau while cards remain in the stock is never the end: keep cycling, because a card that's useless now may be exactly what you need once something else shifts. A game is only truly over when a full cycle of the stock changes nothing.

Draw One vs. Draw Three

This is the single biggest decision that changes how hard the game is, and it's worth understanding rather than treating as a coin flip:

The trap in Draw Three is that a card you skip doesn't come back on the next pass in the same position — it comes back in the same group, so a card buried second or third stays buried until the grouping shifts, which only happens when you play cards off the waste. That's why Draw Three punishes drawing on autopilot far more than Draw One does.

Scoring

Casual play usually doesn't bother scoring at all — you either solve the deal or you don't. But if you want a number attached: standard scoring awards points for sending cards to the foundation (usually 10 points) and moving cards from the waste to the tableau (5 points), with time-based deductions for slow play.

Strategy that actually matters

Generic "think ahead" advice doesn't help much in Klondike. These do:

• Uncover face-down cards before you chase foundation moves. Sending an Ace up early feels productive, but every face-down card you haven't flipped yet is hidden information you need. Prioritize moves that expose a new card over moves that just look tidy.
• Don't empty a column unless you have a King ready to fill it — or you're fine leaving it empty for a while. An empty column is valuable real estate for parking a long run, but only if something can actually go there.
• Hold back an Ace or 2 if playing it blocks a tableau move you need. The foundation isn't going anywhere; a tableau sequence you break by pulling out its base card might not come back together.
• In Draw Three, track what's buried. If a card you need got skipped, you'll need to cycle through the whole stock again to reach it — sometimes more than once. Plan your redeals instead of drawing on autopilot.
• Prefer moves that build the longest valid tableau sequence, since long sequences move together and free up columns faster than moving cards one at a time.

Is every deal winnable?

No — and this is one of the more interesting facts about the game once you dig into it. Computer analysis of Klondike (most notably a large-scale study involving researcher Ronald Bjarnason in the mid-2000s) puts the share of theoretically solvable deals somewhere around 80–90%, when the solver is allowed to see every card and plan perfectly. In real, no-peeking play, the practical win rate is a lot lower than that, since you're making irreversible decisions based on cards you can't see yet. That gap between "theoretically solvable" and "solvable by a human playing honestly" is basically the whole appeal of the game.

It also means a deal can simply lock up: no card able to move to the tableau, none able to go to a foundation, and a stock that cycles round without offering anything. That isn't a bug in the shuffle, it's the losing condition — the same reason not every deal is winnable in the first place.