Rules
How to play Klondike solitaire.
Klondike is the solitaire most people mean when they say solitaire. You deal 28 cards into seven columns, and you win by building four foundation piles from ace to king, one per suit, until all 52 cards are gone.
Last updated 4 September 2026.
How is the board dealt?
What does a Klondike layout look like?
Deal seven columns from left to right. The first column gets one card, the second two, and so on up to seven in the last column, which is 28 cards in total. Only the last card of each column is turned face up; everything beneath it stays hidden. The remaining 24 cards form the stock, which you draw from when the board offers nothing.
Above the columns sit four empty foundations, one per suit. These are what you are filling. A foundation starts with an ace and is built upward in suit order to the king. When all four foundations are complete, every card is off the table and the game is won.
Which moves are legal?
What are the rules for moving cards?
In the columns, cards build downward in rank and must alternate in colour: a red six goes onto a black seven, never onto a red one. You can move a single card or a whole run of correctly stacked cards together. When you move the last face-up card off a column, the face-down card beneath it flips over, which is the main way you make progress.
An empty column is valuable and restricted: only a king, or a run headed by a king, may move into it. Cards go up to a foundation one at a time, in suit, in ascending order. You may also pull a card back down from a foundation into the columns if it helps, which matters more often than beginners expect.
What is the difference between draw one and draw three?
Which draw mode should a beginner pick?
Draw one turns a single card from the stock each time, so every card in the stock is reachable and most deals are comfortable. Draw three turns three cards and lets you play only the top of the three, which locks away two cards out of every three and makes the game markedly harder.
The gap is large. Draw one is winnable most of the time by a careful player; draw three defeats strong players regularly. Start on draw one to learn the shapes, then move to draw three when you want the game to fight back. Scoring usually rewards draw three more heavily for exactly that reason.
How do you actually win more often?
What is the best Klondike strategy?
Prefer any move that flips a face-down card over a move that only rearranges cards already face up. Every flip is new information and usually a new legal move. Work the deepest column first: it holds the most hidden cards and is the most likely to block you later.
Play aces and twos to the foundations immediately, since they can never be needed below. Hold mid-rank cards in the columns while they can still accept a card, because sending a seven up too early can strand a red six with nowhere to go. Empty a column only when you have a king ready to fill it, and when two moves look equal, take the one that keeps more colours available on the bottom row.
What percentage of Klondike games are winnable?
Is every deal solvable?
No. Roughly 79 percent of Klondike deals are theoretically solvable with perfect play and full knowledge of the face-down cards, a figure established by exhaustive computer analysis. Human results are much lower, because you cannot see what is buried: commonly 10 to 15 percent on draw three and 30 to 50 percent on draw one.
That gap is why an unwinnable deal feels unfair. Solitaire Classics has an optional setting that runs a solver over each deal before dealing it and only gives you hands it can prove are finishable, so a loss is a consequence of your choices rather than the shuffle.