Play Solitaire online for free

The classic single-player card game, in its best-known form: Klondike. Turn cards over, build runs, bring all four suits home to the foundations — free, with no ads and no sign-up.

Skip to the game ↓

Rules: how Klondike works

Klondike is played with a full deck of 52 cards across four areas — the same names you’ll see at our table:

• Tableau (seven columns): 28 cards at the start — one card in the first column, seven in the last. Only the top card of each column is face up.
• Stock: the remaining 24 cards, face down. A tap turns over one or three, depending on your draw mode.
• Waste: where turned-over stock cards land; only the top one is playable.
• Foundations (four piles): the goal. Each suit is stacked here in ascending order, ace through king.

Building follows two simple patterns: on the tableau, descending and in alternating colours (only a red 8 fits on a black 9); on the foundations, ascending within a suit. Connected face-up runs move together. When a face-down card is exposed, it flips automatically. Only a king (alone or with its run) may occupy an empty column. The stock recycles without limit. You win when all 52 cards sit on the foundations.

Strategy: the moves that decide games

Klondike punishes aimlessness — most lost games die of the same three mistakes. Play better like this:

Face-down cards are everything. Any move that flips a hidden card beats almost any other. Given two options, take the one that reveals — and prefer the longer hidden column (the right side hides more cards than the left).

Aces and twos go up immediately. The tableau has no use for them. From threes upward, though:

Don’t feed the foundations greedily. A card sent up too early is a building spot you no longer have below. Rule of thumb: promote a card only when both opposite-colour cards one rank below are already on the foundations or provably expendable — and if needed, bring it back down with a tap; our table allows that, exactly as the rules do.

Empty columns are tools, not trophies. Clear a column only when a king is ready for it — and think about which colour: that king will need a queen of the opposite colour to land on it.

The stock is information. Especially in draw-1, a full first pass through the stock just to see what sits where costs nothing — undo and unlimited recycling make it risk-free here.

Difficulty: draw-1 or draw-3

The mode switch above the board decides how the stock behaves. Draw-1 shows every card immediately playable — the relaxed standard, ideal for learning the flow. Draw-3 turns over three at a time with only the top card playable: the same deal becomes markedly harder, because deeper cards are reachable only by playing away what covers them. Honestly: both modes carry a share of card luck — how many deals are winnable depends on the shuffle, not on the site.

History: from patience to a screen classic

Single-player card games — known in Europe as patience games — are documented from the late 18th century and were a fixture of 19th-century drawing rooms. The variant almost everyone now simply calls “Solitaire” carries the name Klondike, after the Canadian gold-rush river region where the game is said to have circulated among prospectors around 1900. It became the world’s default from 1990, when it shipped with every Windows PC — teaching millions to use a mouse along the way. Our table stays true to that quiet heritage: one deck, one board, no hurry.