Klondike Solitaire

Klondike solitaire in the browser, on a phone, tablet or computer, with draw-one and draw-three and no sign-up. Every deal is proved winnable by a solver before it reaches you, so a lost game is always one you could have played differently.

How to play

Build the four foundations up from ace to king, one suit each. On the table, stack downwards in alternating colors — a red six onto a black seven. Only a king moves into an empty column.

Tap a card, then tap where it goes, or drag it. Tap a card twice to send it straight to its foundation. HINT asks the solver what it would play next, and every deal is checked to be winnable before you see it — so if the hint says there is no way home, undo and try a different line.

Winnable solitaire deals

Each shuffle is handed to a solver before you see it. It searches for a winning line, trying the most promising positions first: turning over a face-down card counts as progress, and shuffling cards between columns does not.

The search is kept deliberately short. If it cannot prove a deal quickly, the deal is thrown away and the deck is cut again, which is far cheaper than thinking harder. Finding a winnable deal usually takes a small fraction of a second.

If none of the cuts can be proved, the game says so on screen instead of passing the deal off as winnable.

Draw one or draw three

DRAW 1 turns one card at a time. Gentler, and most deals fall. DRAW 3 turns three at a time, so only every third card is reachable. Pick one on the menu before you deal.

They are different games, so each keeps its own best score. Once every card is face up and the stock is spent, the game offers to finish the bookkeeping for you.

Scoring

Standard Klondike scoring. A card to a foundation pays 10, a card from the waste to the table pays 5, and turning a card face up pays 5. Pulling a card back off a foundation costs 15.

Going back through the stock costs 100 in draw one and 20 in draw three. The clock takes 2 points every ten seconds, and a win adds a bonus that grows the faster you finish. The score never drops below zero.

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