Klondike Solitaire Rules: The Complete Guide

Klondike is the game most people mean when they say "solitaire." It is the one that shipped with Windows in 1990 and taught a generation of office workers to drag a mouse. It is played with a single standard 52-card deck, it takes a couple of minutes to learn, and it is deep enough that people have been arguing about optimal play for a hundred years. This guide covers the rules from the first card of the deal to the final scoring, including the variations you are likely to meet and the vocabulary players use.

The Object of the Game

You win Klondike by building all fifty-two cards onto four foundation piles, one for each suit, each running from Ace at the bottom up to King at the top. Everything else in the game — the shuffling of columns, the digging through the stock, the careful ordering of red and black — exists only to make those four ordered piles possible. When the last King lands, the game is over and you have won.

The Deal

Shuffle the deck and lay out seven columns of cards from left to right. The first column gets one card, the second gets two, the third gets three, and so on through the seventh column, which gets seven. That accounts for twenty-eight cards. Only the last card dealt to each column — the bottom card, the one nearest you — is turned face up. Every card above it stays face down. The remaining twenty-four cards form the stock, placed face down off to one side.

The result is a staircase: a single face-up card in column one, and a column seven cards deep with six hidden cards buried under one visible card. That buried information is the real opponent. You know where twenty-four cards are (in the stock, though not in what order) and you can see seven, but twenty-one cards are completely unknown at the start of play.

The Four Kinds of Pile

The Tableau

The seven columns are collectively called the tableau, and this is where the real work happens. Face-up cards in the tableau are built downward in rank and alternating in colour. A black nine can receive a red eight; that red eight can receive a black seven; and so on. Cards are usually fanned so you can see the rank and suit of every face-up card in a column.

The Stock

The stock is the face-down remainder of the deck, twenty-four cards. Clicking or tapping it turns cards over into the waste. How many turn at once — one or three — is the single biggest rule choice in Klondike, and it is covered in detail below.

The Waste

The waste (sometimes called the talon or the discard pile) holds the cards turned from the stock. Only the top card of the waste is available to play. Once you play it, the card beneath becomes available.

The Foundations

Four foundation piles sit above the tableau, one per suit. They start empty and can only receive an Ace to begin. After that each foundation builds upward in suit: Ace, two, three, and so on to King. A foundation of hearts will never accept a spade, and it will never accept a card that is not exactly one rank above its current top card.

Legal Moves

Everything you are allowed to do in Klondike fits on a short list:

• Turn cards from the stock to the waste. One card or three, depending on the variant.
• Play the top waste card onto a tableau column (descending rank, alternating colour) or onto a foundation (ascending rank, same suit).
• Move a face-up tableau card onto another tableau column, again descending and alternating in colour. A red six goes on a black seven.
• Move a sequence of tableau cards as a unit. If cards are already in a valid descending, alternating run — say black nine, red eight, black seven — you can pick the whole run up by its top card and move it onto a red ten. Most rule sets allow moving any part of a valid run, so you could take just the red eight and black seven from that group. A few stricter sets require moving the entire run or nothing.
• Move a tableau card to a foundation, one at a time. Sequences never move to a foundation as a unit.
• Move a card back down from a foundation to the tableau. Most versions permit this, and it matters more than beginners expect: a five you sent up too early can sometimes be recalled to catch a four.
• Fill an empty column with a King — or with a King and the run beneath it. In standard Klondike, only a King (or an Ace-through-King run headed by a King) may occupy an empty column.

Whenever a move exposes a face-down tableau card, that card is immediately turned face up. This is automatic and is not optional; it is also the main engine of progress in the game.

Draw One Versus Draw Three

In draw-1 Klondike, each click of the stock turns a single card to the waste. Over the course of a pass through the stock, every one of the twenty-four cards spends a turn as the top of the waste, which means every card is reachable. Draw-1 is the friendlier game and is what most casual apps default to.

In draw-3 Klondike, cards turn over three at a time and only the top of the trio is playable. This has a consequence people often miss: on any given pass, only every third card of the stock is available. If you play a card off the top of a triplet, the alignment of the following triplets shifts, which is precisely what makes draw-3 strategic rather than merely harder. Changing which cards you take, and in which order, changes which cards you can reach on the next pass.

Redeals — how many times you may exhaust the stock and turn the waste back over — vary. Unlimited redeals is the most common computer default. Three passes is a common tabletop limit. Some scoring systems, including Vegas, allow one pass in draw-1 and three in draw-3.

Scoring Systems

Standard Scoring

The Microsoft-derived standard scoring familiar to most players awards points for progress and deducts for shuffling cards around unproductively. A typical table:

Timed play often adds a bonus that decays the longer you take, so a fast win is worth more than a slow one. Standard scoring rewards completing games; it is essentially a measure of how efficiently you got there.

Vegas Scoring

Vegas scoring reframes the game as a wager. You "buy" the deck for $52 — one dollar per card — and earn $5 for every card you place on a foundation. Break-even therefore requires getting a little over ten cards home; a complete win returns $260 for a $208 profit. Most losing games finish somewhere between −$52 and −$20, which is why the format feels punishing.

Vegas is normally played with a single pass through the stock in draw-1 or three passes in draw-3, since unlimited redeals would make the wager trivially favourable. Cumulative Vegas carries your bankroll across successive deals, so a long session becomes a single running result rather than a string of unrelated games.

How to Win, and When You Cannot

A win is simply all four foundations complete. A loss arrives more quietly: you reach a position with no legal move that changes anything, cycling the stock forever without a play. Good software detects this and offers to deal again. In physical play you have to recognise it yourself, and the usual signal is completing a full pass of the stock without making a single move.

Not every deal is winnable. Some layouts are dead from the moment they are dealt — for instance, when all four Kings sit above the cards they would need to release. Estimates of how many random draw-1 deals are theoretically winnable with perfect play and perfect information generally land somewhere in the region of eighty percent, with draw-3 meaningfully lower. Human players, lacking knowledge of face-down cards, win considerably less often than that ceiling.

Common Rule Variations

• Any card to an empty column. Dropping the King-only restriction makes the game dramatically easier and is a common "easy mode."
• Deal all cards face up. Sometimes called Thoughtful Klondike, this removes hidden information entirely and turns the game into a pure planning puzzle. It is the format researchers use when measuring solvability.
• Limited redeals. One or three passes instead of unlimited.
• No foundation recall. Cards sent up may never come back down, which raises the cost of premature foundation plays.
• Strict sequence moves. Only complete runs may be relocated, not partial ones.
• Double Klondike. Two decks, nine or ten columns, and eight foundations.
• Westcliff and Easthaven. Ten-column relatives with different deals and different empty-column rules.

Glossary

• Build — to place a card legally on another, either down-and-alternating in the tableau or up-and-in-suit on a foundation.
• Foundation — one of four suit piles built Ace to King; the goal of the game.
• Deal — a single shuffled arrangement of the deck, or the act of laying it out.
• Face-down card — a hidden tableau card, revealed when the card covering it is moved away.
• Pass — one complete trip through the stock.
• Redeal — turning the exhausted waste back over to form a new stock.
• Run (or sequence) — consecutive tableau cards in descending rank and alternating colour.
• Stock — the face-down pile of undealt cards.
• Tableau — the seven playing columns.
• Talon — an older term for the waste, and occasionally for the stock; because it is ambiguous, "waste" is clearer.
• Thoughtful Klondike — the fully visible variant used for solvability analysis.
• Waste — the face-up pile of cards turned from the stock; only its top card is playable.

Those are the rules in full. Knowing them is not the same as playing well, though — Klondike punishes greedy, obvious play surprisingly often. Our companion piece on solitaire strategy covers the decisions that actually separate a forty-percent win rate from a sixty-percent one.