Solitaire

Solitaire — how to play and tips

Classic Klondike solitaire — the version that shipped with Windows and became, by most accounts, the most-played card game in the world. The deal is the traditional Klondike layout: seven tableau columns of increasing size, only the last card in each face up, and the remaining cards forming the stock. Move all fifty-two cards to the four foundation piles, building each one up from ace to king in a single suit, and the game is won the moment the last foundation is complete. There's a running timer and move counter throughout, and your best completion time is tracked separately for each draw mode.

How to play

Tap a card to pick it up. If it's part of a valid descending, alternating-colour run already built on the tableau, every card stacked on top of it comes with it as a group rather than just the single card you touched. Tap it again and it moves automatically — to a foundation pile if that move is legal, otherwise to the first tableau pile that will accept it. Alternatively, once a card or run is picked up, you can tap any other pile directly to place your selection there rather than relying on the automatic best-spot logic.

There is deliberately no dragging anywhere in the game. Dragging is the traditional desktop convention for solitaire, but it works badly on a touchscreen: the drop targets are small relative to a fingertip, and a drag that ends up slightly off a pile typically just snaps back to where it started with no real explanation of what went wrong. Tapping is unambiguous on both a mouse and a finger, and it means the exact same interaction works identically on a phone, a tablet, and a desktop browser — there's no separate simplified mobile mode, because the tap-based system was the primary design from the start rather than a compromise added afterward.

On desktop, Space draws from the stock, U undoes your last move, A triggers auto-complete when it's available, and Ctrl+Z also undoes. The toolbar above the board offers the same three actions — undo, auto, and dealing a new game — as buttons, for anyone who'd rather click than remember keyboard shortcuts.

The rules

Tableau piles build downward in alternating colours — a red six can go on a black seven, but not on a red seven or on a black five. Foundations build upward in a single suit, starting with the ace and running through to the king, and a foundation will only accept the next card in sequence for that specific suit. Only a king, or a run headed by a king, can move onto an empty tableau column, which is what makes emptying a column such a significant moment in a game — it's a slot that only one specific rank can fill. Turning over the stock deals either one card or three cards to the waste pile depending on which draw mode you chose before starting, and once the stock is exhausted, clicking it again recycles the waste back into the stock in the same order so play can continue.

Draw 1 vs draw 3

Draw 1 turns over one card at a time from the stock, which means every card in the deck eventually becomes individually accessible, and the mode is winnable the large majority of the time with careful play — it's the relaxed, more forgiving version most newcomers should start with. Draw 3 turns over three cards at once and only the top card of that group of three is playable at any moment, which means large stretches of the deck can be temporarily buried and unreachable until the stock cycles around again. That restriction makes draw 3 noticeably harder and slower to solve, and it demands more genuine forward planning about which foundation and tableau moves to hold off on. Because the two modes play so differently, best times are tracked completely separately for draw 1 and draw 3 — comparing a draw 1 time against a draw 3 time wouldn't really mean anything, since they're effectively two different games sharing the same board.

Undo and auto-complete

Undo is unlimited and steps back through your entire game move by move, all the way to the initial deal if you want to go that far, so there's never a reason to feel locked into a bad decision made several moves ago. Auto-complete only becomes available once no face-down cards remain anywhere on the tableau — at that point every remaining card's identity is already known, the game is mathematically already won regardless of what order you play it out in, and clicking every remaining card up to its foundation by hand is pure busywork. The auto button appears the instant that condition is met and finishes the game for you in one action, sending every card home automatically.

Strategy

Prioritise moves that turn over a face-down card wherever possible; every hidden card is information you don't have yet, and a tableau column that's still hiding cards is a column you can't fully plan around. Be careful about rushing aces and twos straight to the foundations the moment they appear — a low card left sitting in the tableau is often the only thing available to accept a higher card you need to relocate later, so sending it home too early can quietly close off options. Think before emptying a column entirely: an empty column is genuinely powerful because it's the only place a king can be repositioned to, but it's only useful in that moment if you actually have a king, or a run headed by one, ready to move into it — otherwise you've just spent moves opening a gap you can't immediately use.