Turn 1 vs Turn 3 Solitaire: What Actually Changes
The only rule difference: turn 1 flips one stock card at a time, so every stock card becomes playable. Turn 3 flips three at once and only the top card is playable, hiding two of every three. That single change roughly triples the difficulty. Learn on turn 1, then move to turn 3 when wins feel routine.
Everything else about the two games is identical. Same deal, same tableau rules, same foundations. It's remarkable how much one rule about the stock pile changes, and this page walks through exactly what it changes and why.
You can play both here: turn 1 and turn 3.
The verdict up front
Choose turn 1 if you're learning the game, teaching someone, or you mainly want the satisfaction of finishing. It's the version where good play reliably gets rewarded.
Choose turn 3 if turn 1 wins have become automatic and you want a game that asks you to plan several stock cycles ahead. It's the version serious players eventually settle on, and it's also the standard for Vegas-style play. Our Vegas game pairs its scoring with limited redeals for exactly this reason.
There's no version that's "correct." One is a better puzzle for beginners, the other a better puzzle for people who've stopped losing the first one.
What the numbers say
The gap between the two games isn't a feeling. It shows up in both the theory and the practice.
On the theory side, a University of St Andrews project called Solvitaire solved millions of deals with full knowledge of every card. It found about 90.5% of draw 1 deals and 82% of draw 3 deals are winnable in principle, assuming unlimited redeals and perfect play. So even a perfect player with x-ray vision loses more at turn 3.
Real players do far worse than perfect, and the gap widens. Solitaired, a large solitaire site, published win rates from its own player base: 33% of turn 1 games won across roughly 2.9 million games, against 11.1% of turn 3 games across 1.4 million. Three times harder in practice.
This site can't add its own player win rates to that pile: your stats stay on your own device, so there's no server-side database to report from. What we do have is our own solver. Across 1,000 fixed deals per mode, it confirmed a winning line in at least 47.8% of turn 1 deals and 38.6% of turn 3 deals within its search budget. The solver proves deals winnable and never proves them unwinnable, so those figures are floors, not estimates. The full methodology lives on the odds of winning page.
Why hiding two cards hurts so much
In turn 1, the stock is a conveyor belt. Keep drawing and every one of the 24 stock cards will eventually sit on top of the waste, playable. Your only stock decision is when to play a card versus wait for a better home.
In turn 3, the stock is a lock with an offset. You see cards 3, 6, 9 and so on; the cards between them stay buried unless you shift the pattern. And there's only one way to shift it: actually play a card from the waste. Do that, and every later group of three lands one card differently, exposing a whole new set of cards on the next pass.
This creates a genuinely strange strategic layer. Sometimes the right move in turn 3 is to not play a tempting waste card, because keeping the offset intact shows you a card you need more on the next cycle. Other times you play a card you don't even want, purely to shift what surfaces afterward. Turn 1 has nothing like this. It's the closest solitaire gets to counting cards.
That's also why the two games reward different skills. Turn 1 is mostly tableau craft: flip order, empty-column timing, king selection. Turn 3 is all that plus stock bookkeeping. The tableau skills transfer completely, which is the argument for learning them first where mistakes are cheaper.
Which should you learn first?
Turn 1, and it isn't close.
Turn 1 gives you feedback. When you lose, it's usually because of a tableau decision you can identify, and the win rate of a careful beginner climbs quickly. Turn 3 muddies that feedback: you'll lose plenty of games to stock timing you can't see yet, and it's hard to improve when you can't tell which losses were your fault. Frustration is a real cost. Plenty of people have bounced off solitaire entirely because their first version was turn 3 on some default setting.
A decent graduation test: when you're winning something like a third of your turn 1 games over a meaningful stretch (your stats page here will tell you), turn 3 will feel like a fresh game instead of a punishment.
One more path worth knowing: our daily challenge serves one deal per day to everyone. If turn 3 is beating you up, a daily turn 1 deal is a nice low-stakes way to keep a streak going while you build up the fundamentals from the strategy guide.
Same game, different pace
A subtler difference that stats don't capture: rhythm. Turn 1 games move in a steady drip, draw, play, draw, play. Turn 3 games move in waves; you ride through the whole stock, reassess, replay the cycle with a new offset. Turn 3 games where you claw a win out of the third pass through the stock produce a kind of satisfaction turn 1 rarely matches. That, more than difficulty pride, is why experienced players stay there.
FAQ
What is the difference between turn 1 and turn 3 solitaire?
Turn 1 deals one card from the stock at a time, making every stock card playable when it surfaces. Turn 3 deals three at once, and only the top card of each group can be played, so two thirds of the stock stays blocked unless you change the pattern by playing waste cards. All other rules are identical.
Is turn 3 solitaire harder than turn 1?
Yes, roughly three times harder in practice. Player data from millions of games shows turn 1 win rates around 33% against about 11% for turn 3. Even with every card visible and perfect play, research shows fewer turn 3 deals are winnable at all: about 82% against 90.5% for turn 1.
Is turn 3 the same as 3 card solitaire?
Yes. Turn 3, draw 3, 3 card solitaire, and three-card Klondike all name the same rule: three cards flipped from the stock at once with only the top one playable. Different sites just label it differently. The version you likely grew up with on Windows was turn 1, drawing single cards.
Should beginners play draw 1 or draw 3?
Draw 1. It teaches the tableau skills that both versions share, and its clearer feedback makes improvement faster. Losses in draw 3 often come from stock timing that beginners can't yet see, which makes it a poor teacher. Move to draw 3 once draw 1 wins come regularly, around one game in three.
Do turn 1 and turn 3 use different scoring?
Standard point scoring works the same way in both, though the penalty for recycling the stock differs between them. Vegas scoring is where the draw count really matters: classic Vegas rules allow one stock pass in turn 1 but three passes in turn 3. Details are on our scoring page.