Play Solitaire Online, Free

What you are looking at

The table above is Klondike, dealt turn-one — the game most people mean when they say solitaire. Seven columns hold twenty-eight cards, only the last card of each column face up. Four empty foundations wait at the top right, and the remaining twenty-four cards form the stock at the top left.

Everything runs in your browser. There is no download, no account, and no card images to fetch — each card is drawn in code, which is why the table is ready the moment the page is and stays sharp at any window size.

Tableau

The seven columns you work in. Cards here build downward in alternating colours.

Foundation

The four goal piles. Each takes one suit and climbs Ace, Two, Three … King.

Stock

The face-down pile of undealt cards. Tap it to turn cards over.

Waste

Where turned stock cards land. Only the top card of the waste can be played.

How to play solitaire, move by move

Columns build downward in alternating colours: a red Six goes on a black Seven, a black Queen on a red King. Moving a card flips the face-down card it uncovers, and uncovering cards is the whole early game — the more of the deal you can see, the more choices every later turn has.

Aces go up to the foundations as they appear, and each suit then climbs in order to its King. When a column empties, only a King, or a run headed by one, may take the space. Tap the stock to turn a card onto the waste; you may recycle the waste as often as you like.

Drag a card, or a whole legal run, where you want it. Or simply tap: a tapped card goes to a foundation whenever it fits there. Undo is unlimited and steps back through your entire game, so a line you regret three moves later is never fatal.

• ✓Build the four foundations up from Ace to King, one suit each.
• ✓Columns build downwards in alternating colours.
• ✓Only a King, or a run headed by one, may fill an empty column.
• ✓Turn the stock as often as you like — the waste recycles.

Five habits that raise your win rate

Most solitaire advice is a list of tips without reasons, which makes it impossible to apply to a board you have not seen before. Each of these says why it is true, so you can recognise the situation rather than memorise the rule.

1. 01

   Dig for face-down cards before anything else

   Twenty-one of the twenty-eight tableau cards start hidden, and sixteen of them sit in the three right-most columns. A card you cannot see cannot be planned around, so the move that flips one is almost always worth more than the move that merely looks tidy. When two moves compete, take the one that reveals.

2. 02

   Do not send every Ace and Two up immediately

   A low card on the tableau can still receive a card and help empty a column. Once it is on a foundation it can never do anything again. Send low cards home when they are in the way or when the suit is close behind them, not reflexively.

3. 03

   Only empty a column when a King is ready for it

   An empty column with no King available is not an opportunity, it is a hole that blocks nothing and helps nothing. Check which Kings are reachable before you spend the moves clearing the space.

4. 04

   Learn the stock order on your first pass

   The stock cycles in a fixed order until you play a card out of it, and every card you take shifts the rest. Running the whole stock once before committing costs nothing here — recycling is free and unpenalised — and it tells you which cards are reachable and when.

5. 05

   Prefer information over neatness

   Two elegant sequences and no new face-up cards is a lost game in slow motion. The board looks better and your options have not grown. If a move produces nothing but symmetry, it is usually the wrong move.

Every deal is checked before you see it

Roughly one Klondike shuffle in five cannot be won no matter how well it is played. Most sites deal them anyway and let you discover it after twenty minutes. This table does not: before a deal reaches you, a solver plays it to the end and proves a winning line exists. The Verified badge in the toolbar is that proof, and it will tell you the bot's own move count if you want a number to beat.

The verified turn-one deals in the current pool finish in 127 to 172 moves, median 148. That figure is measured from this site's pool by this site's solver — so when you lose one of these games, a win was genuinely on the table, and unlimited undo means you can walk back and hunt for it.

If you play into a position the solver can prove is dead, the game says so and offers to rewind you to the last point it can still win from. That is a rescue, not a restart: your progress and your clock survive.

Turn 1 or turn 3?

The only rule that differs is how many stock cards a tap turns over. It sounds minor and it changes the game completely, because it decides how much of the deck you can see at once.

Turn 3 hides roughly two thirds of the stock on any given pass, which makes the stock itself a puzzle you solve through tableau play. It has its own page with its own verified deals.

Built to be played on a phone

Below about 720 pixels the cards change shape rather than shrink into illegibility. The pip artwork drops away and each card prints its rank and suit large along the top edge — the strip that stays visible when a card sits inside a fanned column — with the suit repeated in the card body once the card is exposed.

Long columns compress to fit the screen, drags track your finger without lag, and tap-to-play makes most foundation moves a single touch. Your unfinished deal, your settings and your statistics stay in your browser, per game, and are waiting when you come back.

Controls, scoring and the toolbar

The clock and move counter start on your first move, and the score rewards progress: cards reaching a foundation are worth the most, uncovering hidden cards earns along the way, and recycling the stock costs nothing. Pause stops the clock and blurs the table. Nothing here pressures you to hurry.

Hint highlights one legal move when you are staring at nothing. Auto sends every card that can currently reach a foundation home in one sweep, and refuses to run when there is nothing useful to send, so it never inflates your move count.

• ·Drag — move a card or a legal run onto its destination.
• ·Tap or click — sends a card to a foundation when it fits there.
• ·Keyboard — N deals, R restarts the same shuffle, U or Ctrl+Z undoes, H hints, A auto-plays, S asks the bot, P pauses, F fills the screen.
• ·Settings — card designs, backs, table felts, zoom, left-handed layout, sound.

Where solitaire came from

Single-player card games appear in print in northern Europe in the late eighteenth century, and the earliest collections are German and Scandinavian. The English-speaking world borrowed the French word for the idea and called it patience; American usage settled on solitaire instead, which is why the same game answers to two names depending on where you learned it.

The games spread through Victorian parlour books — Lady Adelaide Cadogan's illustrated collection of the 1870s is the one most often credited with fixing the English rules — and by the end of the century dozens of layouts had names, including the seven-column one that would outlast all of them.

What made it universal was software. Microsoft shipped Solitaire with Windows 3.0 in 1990, written by Wes Cherry with card art by Susan Kare, and it was included partly to teach a generation of office workers what a mouse could do: click something, drag it somewhere, let go. Hundreds of millions of people learned drag-and-drop by moving a red Six onto a black Seven.

That history is also why the layout here looks familiar and the details do not always match your memory. Scoring systems, redeal limits and draw counts were never standardised, so every implementation makes choices — which is why this site states its choices in the rules panel on every page rather than assuming you share them.

The eleven games in this room

Each game has its own page with its own rules, strategy and questions. The winnability column is the honest one: it says what this site can actually prove about the deals it hands you, game by game.

“Verified” means a solver played that exact shuffle to a win before you saw it. “Built winnable” means the deal was constructed backwards from a finished game, which is stronger than verification and the only workable method for Spider. “Screened” means every provably dead shuffle was thrown out, without a full solution being found. “Random” means what it says — three games here deal honestly hard and do not pretend otherwise.

Questions about this game

Is this solitaire game really free?

Yes. Every game on the site is free, with no account, no download and no paywalled features. Your statistics and unfinished games are stored in your own browser and never leave it.

Can every deal here actually be won?

Every Klondike deal on this site is verified by a solver before you see it, so a winning line always exists. Whether you find it is the game — and the bot's move count is available if you want to know what you are chasing.

How many cards can I move at once?

As many as form a proper descending run in alternating colours. Drag the highest card of the run you want to move and the rest travel with it.

Do I have to finish a game in one sitting?

No. The deal you are playing is saved in your browser automatically, per game. Close the tab mid-hand and the same position is waiting when you return.

What happens if I get stuck?

Ask for a hint, or undo as far back as you need. If the position is genuinely dead the game detects it and offers to rewind you to the last point the solver can still win from, rather than making you abandon the deal.