How to Play Solitaire

Solitaire is a card game for one player. The version most people mean, and the one that came with Windows, is Klondike: you deal 28 cards into seven piles, then try to move all 52 cards onto four foundations, one per suit, from Ace up to King. In the tableau you build down in alternating colours, a red 6 on a black 7, and you turn through the rest of the deck one or three cards at a time. In the UK the same game is often called Patience.

Solitaire Rules at a Glance

How to Set Up Solitaire

1. Shuffle one 52-card deck.
2. Deal the first row. From left to right, deal one card face up for pile 1, then one card face down on each of piles 2 to 7.
3. Deal the next rows. Go back to pile 2: deal one card face up on it, then one face down on each of piles 3 to 7. Keep going, one pile further right each time, until pile 7 has six face-down cards and one face-up card on top.
4. Place the stock. The 24 cards left over go face down above the tableau, usually at the top left. This is the stock.
5. Leave room next to the stock for the waste pile and, on the right, for four foundations. They all start empty.

How to Play Solitaire

1. Look for Aces. Any Ace that is face up goes straight to a foundation. Then a 2 of the same suit can go on it, then a 3, and so on up to the King.
2. Build down in the tableau. You can put a card on a face-up card one rank higher of the opposite colour: a black 8 on a red 9, a red Queen on a black King.
3. Move runs as a unit. All the face-up cards in a pile can move together onto another pile, as long as the top card of the run fits there.
4. Turn over face-down cards. When you move the last face-up card off a pile, turn the next card face up. It is now in play.
5. Fill empty piles with Kings. A pile with no cards left is a space. Only a King, or a run that starts with a King, can go there.
6. Use the stock. When you can’t move anything else, turn cards from the stock onto the waste. The top card of the waste can go to the tableau or a foundation.
7. Win or get stuck. You win when all 52 cards are on the foundations. If no useful move is left and the stock is used up, the game is lost.

Draw One or Draw Three?

Solitaire is played with two ways of turning the stock. Draw one (turn 1) turns one card at a time, so every card in the stock can be reached. Draw three (turn 3) turns three cards at once and only the top one can be played, so on a pass where you play nothing you see only 8 of the 24 stock cards. Draw three is harder, and it is the most common setting. Common rules for passes through the stock:

Solitaire Scoring

Solitaire with real cards has no score: you win or you don’t. Computer versions add points. Standard scoring in Windows Solitaire works like this:

A card moved from the waste to the tableau and then to a foundation scores 15 instead of 10. In a timed game, 2 points come off every 10 seconds, and a win earns a bonus of 700,000 divided by the seconds taken (for games of 30 seconds or more).

Vegas scoring treats the game as a bet. You start at −52, as if you had paid $1 a card, and win $5 for every card you put on a foundation. In Windows you get three passes with draw three and one with draw one. You need 11 cards on the foundations to come out ahead, and a full win is +208. It copies the way some casinos have run Klondike as a gambling game, called Las Vegas Solitaire: one card at a time, one pass through the stock, and, for example, $50 to play with $5 paid back for each card on the foundations.

Solitaire Rules Questions

Solitaire Strategy

• Turn over face-down cards first. Any move that reveals a hidden card is usually better than one that doesn’t. Work on the piles with the most face-down cards when you can.
• Play from the tableau before the stock. Check every tableau move before you turn the next stock card.
• Don’t empty a pile without a King to fill it. An empty space is only useful when you have a King, or a run headed by one, ready to move in.
• Choose the King’s colour carefully. If a red Queen is waiting, fill the space with a black King, and the other way round.
• Don’t rush every card to the foundations. Aces and 2s should go up at once, but a black 5 in the tableau may be the only place for a red 4 you need to move.
• With draw three, plan the stock. Playing a card from the waste changes which cards come up on the next pass. Sometimes it is worth playing a waste card just to shift the order.

Solitaire by the Numbers

Nobody knows exactly how often Klondike can be won with perfect play. The mathematician Persi Diaconis called it “one of the embarrassments of applied probability”. The 82% figure is an upper limit: it assumes you can see the face-down cards, which you can’t in a real game.

Other Solitaire Games

A Short History of Solitaire

The earliest known rules for Klondike are in the 1907 edition of Hoyle’s Games, as “Seven-Card Klondike”. Where the name comes from is not known; the Klondike Gold Rush is a popular guess with no evidence behind it. In America the game was also called Canfield, perhaps after a casino game at the Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its place in Windows, starting with Windows 3.0 in 1990, did more than anything to make it the best-known solitaire game. An intern, Wes Cherry, wrote it in 1988, and Susan Kare designed the cards. Since 2012 it has been part of Microsoft Solitaire Collection, alongside Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid and TriPeaks.

More Card Games to Try

For another game you can play on your own, or a fast version of solitaire for two or more players, try Kings in the Corner, Nertz, Spit, Spite and Malice and Dutch Blitz, or Golf, a quick card game for two or more.

Play a solitaire game now: Golf solitaire, free in your browser, with the rules and odds.

Another solitaire game to play now: TriPeaks solitaire, free in your browser, with the rules, scoring and odds.

Or try a pairing game: Pyramid solitaire, free in your browser, with the pairs that make 13 and the odds.

Solitaire: frequently asked questions