How to Play Solitaire — Klondike Rules, Step by Step

The object of the game

Klondike is played by one person with a standard deck of 52 cards and no jokers. Aces are low and kings are high. You win when all 52 cards have been moved onto four piles called foundations, one for each suit, each built in order from the ace up to the king.

In the United States the game is usually just called solitaire. In Britain and several other countries, one-player card games are still called patience, and Klondike is one of many patience games. The American word has spread around the world, as Pagat.com notes, largely because of the version that came with Microsoft Windows.

The four parts of the table

• The tableau: seven piles dealt in a row, where most of the play happens. Each pile has a few cards face down and one face up on top.
• The stock: the cards left over after the deal, face down. You turn them up when the tableau runs out of moves.
• The waste: the face-up pile next to the stock, where turned cards land. Some books call it the talon.
• The foundations: four places, empty at the start, where each suit is collected from ace to king.

How to lay out the seven piles is explained card by card in how to set up solitaire, and every word used here has a short entry in the glossary of solitaire terms.

How to play, step by step

1. Deal. Twenty-eight cards go into the seven piles of the tableau: one card in the first pile, two in the second, and so on up to seven. Only the top card of each pile is face up. The other 24 cards form the stock.
2. Send aces up. An ace that is face up and free can start a foundation. After the ace, the 2 of the same suit goes on it, then the 3, and so on.
3. Build down in alternating colors. In the tableau, a card goes on a card one rank higher of the other color: a red 6 on a black 7, a black jack on a red queen.
4. Move ordered cards together. A run of face-up cards that is already in order can be moved as one unit, as long as its top card fits where it is going.
5. Turn up what you uncover. When you move the last face-up card off a pile, the face-down card underneath is turned over and comes into play.
6. Fill an empty pile with a king. When a pile is gone, the space can only take a king, or a run that starts with a king.
7. Turn the stock when you are stuck. Cards go from the stock to the waste, one or three at a time depending on the rules. The top card of the waste can be played to the tableau or a foundation.
8. Go through the stock again, if allowed. When the stock is empty, the waste pile is turned over to become the new stock. How many times you may do this depends on the rules you play by.
9. Win or stop. The game is won when the four foundations hold every card. It is lost when no move that helps is left.

Rules that are not the same everywhere

The steps above are shared by almost every description of Klondike. A few details change from one rule book or program to another, so it is worth agreeing on them before you deal.

One card or three from the stock

Turning one card at a time lets you see the whole stock in order. Turning three at a time, with only the top one playable, hides most of it and makes the game much harder. The difference is big enough for an article of its own: Turn 1 vs Turn 3.

How many passes through the stock

Some rules let you turn the waste over and go through the stock as often as you like. Others allow three passes, and the strictest allow only one. With a single pass, a card you could not play when it turned up is gone for good.

Taking cards back from a foundation

Many versions let you move the top card of a foundation back down to the tableau, for example to give a lower card of the other color a place to land. Others treat the foundations as final. Researchers who study the game call the move “worrying back”; Blake and Gent measured both versions and found that allowing it makes only a small share of deals winnable that would not be otherwise.

Moving part of a run

In the rules as Wikipedia gives them, any face-up card can be moved together with the cards on top of it, so a run can be split and only its lower part moved. Not every description allows this: the rules Yan and his co-authors used in their study of the game move all the face-up cards of a pile together.

Scoring

Klondike needs no score: a game is won or it is not. Computer versions may add one anyway. Microsoft Solitaire offered a standard score and a Vegas score. The standard one, as Microsoft described it, awards points for useful moves and takes them away for steps back:

In a timed game, 2 points are taken off every 10 seconds, and a won game that lasted at least 30 seconds earns a bonus of 700,000 divided by the number of seconds it took. Vegas scoring comes from a casino game: in the example of the Bicycle Official Rules of Card Games (1999), as Wikipedia reports it, a player pays $50 to play and is paid $5 for every card that reaches a foundation, with the stock dealt one card at a time and only once. Computer versions of Vegas scoring do not all use the same amounts or the same limit on passes.

Where Klondike comes from

Nobody knows for certain why the game is called Klondike. The name is often linked to the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, but there is no evidence for it. The earliest known rules of the game as it is played today appear in the 1907 edition of Hoyle’s Games, under the name Seven-Card Klondike; at that time, plain “Klondike” meant the game Americans now call Canfield. By 1913 the Official Rules of Card Games gave the name Klondike to the seven-pile game and called the other one Canfield.

The game became famous worldwide with Microsoft Solitaire. Wes Cherry wrote it as an intern at Microsoft in the summer of 1988, and it shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990. Part of its purpose was to help people new to Windows get used to the mouse, and to dragging and dropping. In 2019 it was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

Play Klondike now

Deal a game in your browser: Turn 1 Klondike (draw one) or Turn 3 Klondike (draw three).

Read next

• How to set up solitaire — dealing the seven piles with a real deck, card by card.
• Turn 1 vs Turn 3 solitaire — what drawing one card or three does to the game.
• Solitaire strategy — habits that win more deals, from the opening to the stock.

Sources

• Klondike (solitaire), Wikipedia
• How to play Solitaire, Bicycle Cards
• Card solitaire (patience) games, Pagat.com, John McLeod
• Solitaire: Man Versus Machine, Xiang Yan, Persi Diaconis, Paat Rusmevichientong and Benjamin Van Roy, NIPS 2004
• The Winnability of Klondike Solitaire and Many Other Patience Games, Charlie Blake and Ian Gent, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 85, 2026
• Microsoft Solitaire, Wikipedia