How to Play Klondike Solitaire

That's the whole game in five sentences. The rest of this guide walks through each part slowly: how to set up the board, which moves are legal, how the stock and waste piles work, and the habits that separate people who win a third of their games from people who win almost none.

If you'd rather learn by doing, open a game on the homepage and keep this page in another tab. The rules below match exactly what the game will and won't let you do.

The goal

Move all 52 cards onto the four foundation piles. Each foundation holds one suit and must be built in order: ace, 2, 3, and so on up to the king. Four suits, thirteen cards each, 52 total. When the last king lands, you've won.

Everything else in the game, every column move and every trip through the stock, exists to feed those four piles.

How to set up solitaire

If you're playing online, setup is done for you. If you're using a real deck of cards, here's the deal, and it's worth knowing even for online play because the shape of the deal explains a lot of strategy later.

1. Shuffle the full 52-card deck. No jokers.
2. Deal seven columns in a row. The first column gets 1 card, the second gets 2, the third gets 3, continuing up to 7 cards in the last column.
3. Deal them in passes: one card to each column left to right, then one card to each column starting from the second, then from the third, and so on. Only the last card dealt to each column goes face up.
4. Place the remaining 24 cards face down in a single pile. That's the stock.
5. Leave room above the columns for four foundation piles. They start empty.

You end up with 28 cards on the table (21 face down, 7 face up) and 24 in your hand. The seven columns are called the tableau. The face-down cards are the real obstacle: you can't win until every one of them has been flipped.

The four zones of the board

Knowing the names makes the rest of the rules much easier to follow.

The tableau is the seven columns. This is your workspace, and it's where almost all the actual decisions happen.

The foundations are the four piles you're trying to fill, one per suit, built up from ace to king.

The stock is the face-down pile of 24 leftover cards. When you can't find a move on the table, you draw from here.

The waste is the face-up pile next to the stock where drawn cards land. Only the top card of the waste is playable.

Legal moves

There are only five kinds of moves in Klondike. Once these feel automatic, you've learned the game.

1. Build down on the tableau, alternating colors

A face-up card can be placed on a tableau card that is one rank higher and the opposite color. A red 6 can go on a black 7. A black jack can go on a red queen. A red 9 on a red 10 is illegal, and so is a black 5 on a black 5.

Ranks run king (high) down to ace (low) on the tableau. So a full column would read king, queen, jack, 10, down to the ace, colors alternating the whole way.

2. Move sequences as a group

A run of correctly stacked cards moves together. If you have a black 8 with a red 7 on it, you can pick up both and drop them on any red 9. You don't have to move the whole run, either. In standard Klondike you may move any face-up portion of a sequence, so you could take just that red 7 and move it onto a black 8 in another column if that helps more.

3. Flip face-down cards

When you move away everything covering a face-down card, flip it face up. This isn't optional and there's no reason to wait. Flipping cards is how you make progress, and most good strategy boils down to engineering more flips. Our strategy guide is largely about this one idea.

4. Fill empty columns with kings

When a column runs out of cards completely, the space can only be filled by a king, alone or with its run attached. Not a queen, not whatever card you happen to have handy. A king. This rule surprises beginners more than any other, and it's also behind one of the classic beginner mistakes covered below.

5. Move cards to the foundations

An ace can go to an empty foundation any time it's available. After that, each foundation accepts only the next card of its own suit: the 2 of hearts goes on the ace of hearts, then the 3 of hearts, and so on. You can play to foundations from the top of any tableau column or from the top of the waste.

Most versions, including ours, also let you bring a foundation card back down to the tableau if it fits. That sounds pointless until the day you desperately need a red 4 back in play to hold a black 3.

The stock and waste

When nothing useful is left on the table, you draw from the stock. How many cards you draw at once is the biggest rule difference between versions of Klondike.

Turn 1 (draw 1): flip one card at a time from stock to waste. Every card in the stock will eventually be seen and playable. This is the friendlier version. You can play it on our turn 1 page.

Turn 3 (draw 3): flip three cards at once. They land on the waste fanned out, but only the top one is playable. To reach the second card, you have to play the one above it somewhere first. This buries two thirds of your stock behind timing puzzles and makes the game noticeably harder. Try it on the turn 3 page.

When the stock runs out, you turn the waste pile over (without shuffling it) and it becomes the stock again. In casual play, both turn 1 and turn 3 allow unlimited passes through the stock. Stricter rule sets limit turn 3 to three passes, and Vegas scoring rules limit redeals sharply; see the scoring guide for how that works.

The order of cards in the stock never changes. That matters. In turn 3, playing one card from the waste shifts which cards you'll see on every later pass, which is where most of the depth of that version lives. The turn 1 vs turn 3 comparison goes deeper on the difference.

Winning, and knowing when you've won

Once every face-down card has been flipped and the stock is empty or fully accessible, the rest is usually mechanical: feed everything to the foundations in order. Most digital versions, ours included, offer an auto-finish at this point so you don't have to drag the last twenty cards one by one.

Losing is less obvious. A game is dead when no legal move improves your position: nothing on the waste helps, no tableau move flips a new card, and cycling the stock just shows you the same useless options. Recognizing a dead game early is a skill. Recognizing a game that merely looks dead is a better one.

Not every deal can be won, even played perfectly. Research puts winnable turn 1 deals at about 90%, and this site's own solver has confirmed winning lines in at least 47.8% of a large fixed sample of deals within its search budget. If you want the full numbers, including why real players win far fewer, see odds of winning.

Common beginner mistakes

These five mistakes cost beginners more games than bad luck does.

Racing cards to the foundations. Sending every playable card straight up feels productive, but low cards often do more work on the tableau, holding other cards, than sitting on a foundation. Once your 2s and 3s are up, slow down and ask whether each card is needed in play before promoting it.

Emptying a column with no king ready. An empty column that you can't fill is wasted space, and you paid cards to create it. Before you clear a column, check that a useful king (ideally with a queen of the opposite color in reach) is available to take the spot.

Drawing from the stock too early. Every draw is free information in turn 1, but in turn 3 it advances your position in the stock cycle, and that has a real cost. Exhaust your tableau moves first. Always.

Ignoring the face-down counts. Column seven starts with six hidden cards; column two starts with one. A move that flips a card in a long column is usually worth more than one that flips a card in a short column, because the long columns are where games are won and lost.

Treating undo as cheating. In physical solitaire, sure, no take-backs. Online, undo is a learning tool. Rewinding to see what a different choice would have done teaches you more per game than anything else on this page.

Playing with a real deck

Everything above applies to a physical deck, with two honest differences. First, no undo and no hints, so mistakes are permanent. Second, nobody deals you a guaranteed-winnable game; with real cards, some fraction of your deals are simply lost before you start. If the shuffling and re-dealing is part of the charm for you, great. If not, the browser version sets up instantly and tracks your stats on your own device.