Klondike Solitaire

The board has three working areas. The seven columns across the middle are the tableau, where most of the game happens. The four foundations at the top right are where cards retire, each suit in its own pile, Ace first, then two, three, and so on up to King. The stock at the top left holds the cards that weren't dealt; click it to turn cards over into the waste pile beside it, where the top card is always available for play.

In the columns, cards build downward in descending order and alternating colours — a black Ten on a red Jack, a red Nine on that black Ten. You may move a single card or a properly ordered run of cards together. When a move uncovers a face-down card, it turns over on its own. An empty column accepts only a King, alone or with its retinue. The game is won when all fifty-two cards reach the foundations.

We offer the two standard ways of turning the stock. Draw one turns a single card at a time and is the friendlier game. Draw three turns three, of which only the top is playable — the traditional, stricter game. In both, when the stock runs out you may turn the waste over and go through it again, as many times as you need. No move is ever final here: the undo button remembers everything back to the deal.

A short history

Klondike takes its name from the Canadian gold-rush territory of the 1890s, where the game is said to have passed the long subarctic evenings of prospectors who had more patience than luck. It travelled home in their pockets, settled into American parlours, and never left. A century later it was bundled with desktop computers as, officially, a way to teach people to use a mouse — and it quietly became the most-played computer game in history. Whole office buildings learned to drag and drop on it. You are in good company.

Advice that actually helps

• Turn face-down cards over before anything else. Every hidden card is information you don't have. Given two legal moves, prefer the one that flips a card, and prefer digging into the longer buried piles early.
• Don't empty a column without a King ready. An empty space you can't fill is a move wasted; an empty space filled by the wrong-coloured King can lock the Queen you actually needed.
• Don't rush cards to the foundations. A Two can go up immediately, but middle cards — Fives through Nines — often do more work in the columns, holding runs together. Send a card up only when it's no longer useful below, or when undo can bail you out.
• Mind the colour of your Kings. Before filling a space, look at which Queens and Jacks are still buried. A red King helps you only if a black Queen can follow it.
• In draw-three, count in threes. The same three cards surface each pass unless you change the rhythm. Playing or holding one card from the waste shifts the whole sequence and can unbury a card you thought unreachable.

Common mistakes

The commonest error is reflexively playing every card that fits. Each move should either flip a hidden card, free a space, or set up a move that will — otherwise it may simply be rearranging furniture. The second is ignoring the waste pile's future: in draw-three, playing the top card changes which cards you'll see next pass, and sometimes the wise play is to leave it be. The third is despair. Roughly four deals in five are winnable with careful play, but nobody wins them all — even flawless play loses some deals, and that is the game's fault, not yours. That's what the next deal is for.