Klondike Solitaire

What you need & setup

1. Shuffle a standard 52-card deck (no jokers).
2. Deal seven tableau piles in a row: 1 card in the first pile, 2 in the second, up to 7 in the seventh — 28 cards in all.
3. Turn the top card of each tableau pile face up; the cards beneath stay face down.
4. Place the remaining 24 cards face down as the stock.
5. Leave space above the tableau for four foundation piles, one per suit, which start empty.

Turn sequence

1. Look for aces first — any face-up ace moves straight to a foundation.
2. Move face-up tableau cards onto other tableau piles: one rank lower and the opposite color (the red 6♥ or 6♦ goes on the black 7♠ or 7♣).
3. When a face-down card becomes the top of its pile, flip it face up.
4. When a tableau pile is emptied, only a king (alone or with its sequence) may be moved into the space.
5. If you are stuck, deal from the stock to the waste pile (one or three cards, depending on your variation) and try to play the top waste card.
6. Send cards to the foundations whenever it helps: each foundation builds up in a single suit — A, 2, 3 ... J, Q, K.
7. Keep going until every card reaches a foundation (you win) or no useful moves remain.

The Tableau Layout

The tableau is the row of seven piles dealt at the start, growing from one card to seven. Only the top card of each pile starts face up.

Face-up cards in the tableau are built in descending order with alternating colors: a black jack can take a red 10, which can take a black 9, and so on.

A run of properly-sequenced face-up cards moves as a unit. You can slide the 8♠-7♥-6♣ run together onto a red 9.

The Foundations

The four foundations are the goal. Each one holds a single suit, built upward starting from the ace: A, 2, 3, and so on to the king.

For example, once the A♦ is up, the 2♦ can join it, then the 3♦ — but never a club, and never out of order.

In most friendly rules you may pull a foundation card back into the tableau if you need it, though it is rarely a good idea.

Legal Moves

Tableau to tableau: place a face-up card (or run) on a card one rank higher of the opposite color. The 10♥ can go on the J♠ or J♣, never on the J♦.

Any playable card can go to its foundation when it is the next rank in its suit.

Empty tableau columns accept only kings. If you clear a pile and have no king to move, the space sits idle.

Whenever a move uncovers a face-down tableau card, flip it — uncovering hidden cards is how the game opens up.

Stock and Waste

The 24 undealt cards form the stock. When you can't (or don't want to) move anything on the table, deal from the stock into a face-up waste pile.

Only the top card of the waste is playable, either onto a tableau pile or a foundation.

The two classic dealing styles are draw 1 (turn one card at a time, usually with unlimited passes through the stock) and draw 3 (turn three at once, so only every third card is initially reachable). Draw 3 is noticeably harder and is the traditional standard.

When the stock runs out, flip the waste pile over — without shuffling — to form a new stock, subject to whatever pass limit you are playing with.

Winning and Losing

You win the moment all 52 cards are on the foundations, each suit stacked ace through king.

You lose when no legal move can make progress: nothing playable in the tableau, nothing usable from the stock and waste.

Not every deal is winnable, and even winnable deals can be lost with the wrong choices — that is where the strategy lives.

Scoring & how the game ends

• Casual play usually ignores points entirely: you simply win or lose the deal.
• The common computer scoring awards points for building — for example, moving a card to a foundation or turning over a tableau card — with time penalties in timed modes.
• Vegas-style point scoring starts you at -52 points and awards 5 points per card played to a foundation (see rule variations).
• Many players just track their win percentage across deals.

Winning: Move all 52 cards to the foundations, building each suit in order from ace to king.

Common variations

These are genuine regional and house-rule differences — none of them is “the one true way” to play. Agree with your table before starting.

• Draw 3

  The stock is dealt three cards at a time and only the top of the three is playable, making card access much tighter. This is the traditional standard form; draw 1 is the easier variation.

  Common: The default in traditional play and most software.

• Limited passes

  Instead of unlimited trips through the stock, you get one or three passes total, after which the stock is dead. Fewer passes make the game substantially harder.

  Common: Common in stricter traditional rules.

• Vegas-style point scoring

  A point-scoring challenge mode: you start at minus 52 points and earn 5 points for every card placed on a foundation, trying to finish with a positive total. Played here purely as a scoring system — a way to measure partial progress across deals.

  Common: Popular in computer versions.

• Thoughtful Klondike

  All cards are dealt face up (or you may examine any pile), turning the game into a pure planning puzzle with no hidden information.

  Common: Favored by players who enjoy full-information puzzles.

A little history

Klondike's precise origin is unclear, but the name is generally traced to the Klondike gold rush era, and the game belongs to the much older European family of patience games.

Its inclusion as a free game on personal computers made it, by most accounts, the most-played card game in the world.